Country’s trade deficit narrows to a 5-year low.By Ana Swanson, The New York Times.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services narrowed more than 10%from August to September, as the Trump administration’s tariffs continued to weigh on trade,
data from the Commerce Department showed.
Imports grew just 0.6% from August to $342.1 billion, while exports rose 3% in the month, to $289.3 billion, according to data released Thursday.
Because exports grew more than imports, the U.S. trade deficit shrank, in line with the Trump administration’s goals.
At $52.8 billion, the trade deficit in goods and services hit its lowest level in September since June 2020, when the United States was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trade experts have cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from a few months of Data and said that trade patterns have recently been distorted by businesses’ efforts to avoid paying tariffs.
President Donald Trump has long seen the trade deficit as a sign of economic weakness.
Trump repeats a standard error: treating the trade deficit as a report card on national health. His reason: The word “deficit” confuses people.
If we send more money to foreigners than they send us, that’s a moneydeficit. If they send us more goods and services than we send them, that’s our goods and servicessurplus.
A trade is an exchange of presumed equals (“I’ll send you ‘A’ if you send me ‘B.'”)
So why is it called a trade “deficit”? Isn’t it also a trade “surplus”?
Further, the U.S. creates dollars at will by pressing a few computer keys. Virtually no labor or raw materials are required, and we can make dollars endlessly.
The goods and services we receive rely on labor and raw materials, which are limited resources. We offer something that costs us nothing to create, and in return, we receive valuable items; yet, we refer to this as a “deficit.”
It’s quite strange. I would gladly accept that kind of “trade” any day of the year.
It feels more like stealing than trading. Each year, I experience what some might call a “deficit” with my grocer, my favorite restaurants, my gas station, and others. I exchange dollars—currency that my government can produce at no cost—for valuable food and gasoline.
I don’t feel cheated. While I worked for some of my income, as a retiree, most of my current earnings come to me effortlessly. Despite that, I can still exchange those dollars for valuable goods and services.
And still, by the current definition, I’m running a “trade deficit.” It’s nuts.
I wouldn’t have had to work as much if my government had given me dollars for health care, food, housing, education, etc., which it easily could have done at virtually no effort, just by punching a few more computer keys.
The sweeping tariffs Trump has imposed on imports from countries around the world thisyear, including on automobiles, metals and furniture, have led to big swings in trade.
Before tariffs went into effect, many U.S. businesses brought in a surge of products toavoid paying import taxes.
After Trump’s global tariffs took effect on August 7, imports slowed sharply, then recovered somewhat in September.
On August 29, the Trump administration also ended the “de minimis” exemption, whichallowed foreign shipments valued at less than $800 to come into the United States tariff-free.
Opponents criticized the rule as a loophole that penalized U.S. manufacturers in favor offoreign competitors.
That’s another way of saying, “Make imports more expensive to consumers, so American manufacturers can charge consumers more and/or deliver inferior products.“
That might help a few American manufacturers, but do you want higher prices and inferior quality?
Is this good news or bad news? If Americans are buying fewer goods because they are more expensive or harder to obtain, the deficit will decrease. However, this also means a reduction in consumer welfare, which is essentially what inflation and recessions mean.
Currently, we are trading inflation for a shrinking trade deficit—a lousy trade by any definition.
In short, Trump has made trade worse to make the “trade deficit” numbers look better.
SUMMARY
The term “trade deficit” is often misunderstood; it can actually be considered a trade surplus by logical standards. We receive valuable and often scarce goods and services in exchange for dollars, which our government can produce in unlimited quantities at virtually no cost or effort.
Lawmakers in Texas are altering leadership and classes at UT Austin. By Vimal Patel The New York Times AUSTIN, Texas
In a state dominated by conservatives, the University of Texas at Austin stood out. Its leadership had often been a thorn in the side of the state’s politicians, resisting efforts to erode faculty power and championing diversity.
The university defended its race-conscious admissions policy all the way to the Supreme Court in 2016. It has long been a magnet for liberal students and student activism.
Today, the conservatives are winning. State Republicans have passed laws to curtail what is taught in college classes and installed new university administrators with partisan affiliations, among a host of new strategies to remake a public higher education system that they argue has been held hostage to left-leaning ideas and become hostile to conservative ones.
The University of Texas is one of their main targets. The campus is no longer led by an academic, but a Republican lawyer who worked for the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton.
The president has promised curricular changes, and the system is now conducting an audit of all gender studies courses, after a state House bill passed in May enshrined in state law that there are effectively only two genders.
Another piece of legislation, Senate Bill 37, gutted faculty control of universities, tightened a grip on what can be taught and gave appointed boards the power to approve academic leaders.
The Austin campus has opened the School of Civic Leadership, one of many such new schools on college campuses with the goal of attracting more conservative students. The university laid off several dozen employees last year after a state law made diversity and inclusion offices illegal at public colleges.
A similar story is playing out across Texas. This fall, the firing of a Texas A&M instructor teaching a gender studies course after a student complained put the university at the center of a national debate over a crackdown on professors’ speech. The instructor’s department head and dean also lost their administrative posts, and eventually, the Texas A&M president resigned.
Last month, the university system’s regents went further than Texas lawmakers, approving a policy that requires courses that teach “race or gender ideology” to have presidential approval.
The Texas Tech University System has also sought to limit how race and gender are taught in its schools and created a new course approval process.
But perhaps no campus embodies the depth of the change in Texas higher education more than UT Austin, located blocks from the Texas Capitol.
The Austin campus is one of a handful of universities that has responded warmly to a Trump administration offer to give funding preferences to schools that adhere to its list of policy prescriptions.
The proposal was widely panned by advocates of academic freedom. The handful of other schools that embraced it are right-leaning schools, such as New College in Florida. Some faculty and students worry lawmakers are trying to turn the University of Texas — a selective school with students from across the country — into a conservative campus.
But state officials and the university’s new leaders, along with the Trump administration, say their goal is to restore balanceto universities. “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in October. “We must end indoctrination.”
Right-wing, fascist indoctrination is OK, however.
In a “state of the university” speech in October, Jim Davis, the University of Texas president, said changes on campus are meant “to create balance.” “We don’t want degree programs that are so narrow they develop only one perspective,” he said.
Right-wing perspective is allowed. The left-wing perspective that created Social Security, Medicare, poverty aids, and equal rights legislation is not allowed.
The Trump administration this year has led an aggressive attack against higher education, threatening to strip a set of mostly private institutions of large sums of money if they don’t conform to the president’s policies. But it is public university systems that are seeing the biggest changes.
For years, Florida, which, like Texas, has unified Republican control of state government, served as a lab for conservative changes. Other conservative states like Indiana, Ohio and Alabama have also demanded changes at their schools that have led to quick acquiescence, most notably the closure of diversity programs and new limits on professors.
But the main energy is in Texas, where Republicans who learned from Florida are going even further. The changes over the last year have been rapid fire, leaving students and faculty members reeling.
At a coffee shop across the street from the Austin campus last month, five students spoke of fear and helplessness. Sofia Gomez, a rhetoric and writing major, said a history professor told her of pulling a book about the experiences of a transgender man, a move the professor described as the toughest decision of her career. “I considered transferring out of UT,” said Gomez, “because if my professors are unable to teach me, and I’m not able to have candid conversations to get a proper education, what am I here for?”
The idea is that if we pretend gay people don’t exist, then they won’t exist.
A poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, found 40% of faculty respondents are changing their syllabus or teaching approach to comply with state legislation. “I take classes that are supposed to be about politics, and a lot of professors are scared to even apply anything we learn to the modern day,” said Mia Reballosa, a junior majoring in government.
Next, we’ll get rid of vaccination and teach prayer instead. That should protect our children against disease.
“There’s this large looming fear on campus.” The university is exploring consolidating many liberal arts departments, an effort many faculty members believe is aimed at eliminating politically controversial departments.
Teaching religion instead of science is not controversial.
The university said the academic reviews will explore factors like student demand and academic rigor. “The university,” its statement read, “is also encouraging academic units that have allowed some of their hiring, programs and course offerings to become excessively politicized to instead recommit themselves to balanced inquiry, depoliticized curricula and welcoming a diverse range of views (especially on controversial issues).”
Balanced? Depoliticized? Deverse? Sure, as long as we get rid of immigrants, because they are replacing us. Right?
Mary Neuburger, head of Slavic and Eurasian studies, another department under threat, said she remained quiet until she had trouble sleeping at night. Then she began talking publicly. “There’s total chaos,” Neuburger said in an interview, noting a constant turnover of administrators.
“When you tell a unit they might not exist by the end of the year, what do you think that does for morale?” “I’ve been at UT for almost 30 years,” she added, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.
The Chicago Bears have scored at least one touchdown in almost every game. Therefore, the Chicago Cubs should be able to score at least one touchdown in every game.
If you think that comment is ignorant, why? Because baseball and football are different activities operating under different rules.
So what about this comment: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do.” It too is ignorant, and for the same reason. The federal government and families operate under different financial rules.
The statement was made repeatedly by President Barack Obama in 2011 and 2012. He also vowed to cut the debt by trillions of dollars, which makes him one of the more economically ignorant Presidents in American history.
The differences between football and baseball are well known. The differences between the finances of our Monetarily Sovereign federal government and a monetarily non-sovereign family still cause confusion, partly because the same words are used: “Debt,” “deficit,” “bond,” “note,” “bill,” “owe,” “pay.”
It’s just that the words have different meanings for the federal government vs. households. And although football and baseball share words—ball, win, score, game, position, league. player, helmet, team, catch, run — we are educated in the difference, and would laugh at anyone who confuses the two.
Federal “waste” is completely unlike family “waste,” and for the same reasons.
The Festivus Report is Senator Rand Paul’s way of complaining about what he considers to be wastefulfederal spending. Here are a few items from the 2024 report. As you read, decide for yourself whether you consider any (all?) of them to be “wasteful.”
1. F-35 Sustainment Cost Overruns — Tens of Billions. The F-35 program is the most expensive weapons system in history. GAO and the DoD IG report that maintenance costs are projected to exceed expectations by $1.3 trillion over the jets’ lifetimes.
Why it’s considered waste: Underperformance; aircraft not meeting readiness targets; cost inflation far above projections.
2. Failed DoD Program: Future Combat Systems (FCS) — $18 Billion Lost. Canceled in 2009 after years of development.
Cost taxpayers over $18 billion with almost nothing field-ready. Why it’s a waste: The Largest failed weapons modernization attempt since the Cold War.
3. Hurricane Katrina & Sandy Aid Duplication — Several Billion. GAO found: Multiple billions in duplicated housing payments (FEMA + SBA + HUD). Fraud, improper payments, and administrative failures across federal disaster relief programs.
4. Nuclear Waste Repository Project: Yucca Mountain — ~$15 Billion. Congress spent roughly $15 billion designing and preparing Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste site. The project has been effectively abandoned for political reasons.
Why it’s a waste: The facility was never opened despite the massive investment.
5. ACA Federal Co-op Failures — $2.4 Billion. The Affordable Care Act created 23 non-profit insurance co-ops. 21 of the 23 collapsed, losing ~$2.4 billion in federal loans.
Why it’s a waste: Most co-ops failed within a few years, leaving almost no lasting benefit.
6. Border Wall Cancellations — $2 Billion in Stranded Materials & Contracts. When the administration changed in 2021, DHS paid over $2 billion in continued contract costs, demobilization, storage of unused materials, and cancellation penalties.
Why it’s a waste: Taxpayers paid for materials and contracts that never produced the intended infrastructure.
7. Federal Improper Payments — Over $200 Billion Annually. Not fraud—just errors. Medicaid improper payments in recent years: $50–80 billion. Medicare: $30–40+ billion. Earned Income Tax Credit: $15–20 billion. UI benefits during COVID spikes: tens of billions. Annual total often exceeds $200 billion, easily clearing the $1 billion threshold.
Why it’s a waste: Payments made to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or with no documentation.
8. USPS Pre-Funding Mandate Losses — Tens of Billions. For years, USPS had to pre-fund 75 years of employee health benefits: This created massive financial losses of tens of billions.
While not “waste” caused by USPS mismanagement, it’s widely cited as economically irrational spending.
9. IRS Business Systems Modernization (early 2000s failures) — ~$2–3 Billion Lost: An attempt to completely modernize IRS IT systems. Vast portions had to be scrapped or rebuilt because contractors and the IRS couldn’t deliver working systems.
Why it’s a waste: Billions spent, but many components never functioned.
10. Afghanistan Reconstruction Waste — Over $19 Billion Identified From the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction: More than $19 billion in documented waste, fraud, and abuse. Examples: empty schools, unused power plants, abandoned buildings, failed police programs, and aircraft that were scrapped for pennies.
Why it’s a waste: Projects that were never usable or never used.
Have you already decided which, if any, of these expenditures are federal “waste”?
Let’s first clarify what we mean by the term “waste.”
Rand Paul claims “waste” includes: “Underperformance, not meeting readiness targets, cost inflation far above projections, failed modernization, duplicated payments, never opened, failed quickly, never produced, and payments made to the wrong person, in the wrong amount.”
Do you agree that those things constitute waste?
Here is the Merriam-Webster definition: to spend money or consume property extravagantly or improvidently.I never use these tax dollars. I make new ones for spending.
Virtually everything the federal government does would be considered “extravagant.” Let’s face it, for the federal government, “million” barely rates a footnote on any budget. Even “billion” may not be noticeable. “Trillion” is the standard.
I suspect Rand Paul is talking about something like “useless,” as in flushing money down the toilet or throwing it in a bonfire.
That is why I take issue with Paul, because I don’t feel money is being used uselessly in the ten examples. I don’t feel they “flush money down the toilet” or “burn money in a bonfire.” In fact, I suggest that those projects were valuable to the American economy.
Let’s begin with these facts:
None of the tenprojects cost you, the American taxpayer, one cent. The federal government does not pay its bills with tax dollars. It pays with newly created dollars, ad hoc, simply by pressing computer keys, which it can do, endlessly.
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Nonfederal Spending + Net Exports. All federal spending grows the U.S. economy and enriches the American people as the dollars circulate.
Some things were accomplished. New products were invented; new systems were learned, and old systems were discarded. Learning what doesn’t work can be as valuable as learning what does.
None of the spending reduced the federal government’s ability to spend in the future. The government has the infinite ability to create dollars and use them for any purpose it chooses.
In short, for a Monetary Sovereign nation, “waste” is never about dollars. It is about real resources. Domestic failed programs circulate money into the economy. Only programs that destroy or export real resources can cause true economic loss.
Even then, the loss is mitigated by the political and financial positive effects of spending U.S. dollars in another nation. That nation, having dollars, is more likely to become a customer for U.S. businesses. Enriching other nations benefits our economy; we sell more to nations that have dollars than to nations that don’t
Consider number 10. “Afghanistan reconstruction.” To the extent that American businesses were involved, we benefited from the dollars these businesses received and from the experience they gained.
A substantial portion of Afghanistan’s reconstruction spending went to U.S. contractors, paid American engineers, logisticians, security firms, and auditors, flowed through U.S. banks, payrolls, suppliers, and insurers, and supported domestic production of equipment and services.
The only real loss would have been any U.S. raw materials used to make things left in Afghanistan.
Number 8, “USPS Pre-Funding Mandate Losses” isn’t even a cost. It’s just bookkeeping. Nothing was spent.
Public discussion of “wasteful federal spending” almost always misses the central point of Monetary Sovereignty: dollars are not a scarce federal resource.
Again, the U.S. government, being Monetarily Sovereign, cannot run out of dollars, does not need to obtain dollars from taxpayers, and creates new dollars every time it spends. Therefore, evaluating “waste” in terms of dollars alone is analytically meaningless.
A dollar spent by the federal government is not lost; it is added to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the commonly used measure of our economy. Every federal dollar spent—whether you approve of the program or not—enters the private sector as income.
Reminder: GDP = Federal Spending+Nonfederal Spending+Net Exports
In that sense, so-called “wasteful spending” is still “helicopter money,” and helicopter money is by definition stimulative, not lost. It enlarges GDP and strengthens private balance sheets.
A failed defense program, a scrapped IT project, a canceled contract, or even an improper payment all have the same macroeconomic effect: they increase domestic income. They are engineering or managerial failures, not monetary failures, for a Monetarily Sovereign government.
A resource constraint matters only when it prevents something else from happening. During the years of Afghanistan reconstruction, the United States did not experience full employment, nor did it cancel or delay major domestic projects because labor or industrial capacity had been “used up.”
Construction workers, engineers, manufacturers, and logistics firms were not exhausted; many sectors had idle capacity. In fact, much industrial and organizational capacity expanded during this period rather than contracted.
Most of the materials used—steel, concrete, fuel, vehicles, electronics—were manufactured goods that can be reproduced. Their destruction represents transformation, not permanent loss.
The real, irrecoverable losses were human lives, injuries, and trauma, and possibly some rare raw materials. Those losses are real and cannot be dismissed.
Claims of broader “economic waste” rely on treating money as a scarce resource and assuming a “crowding out” that did not occur. Absent full employment or canceled domestic production, those claims are hypothetical at best.
Meanwhile, the spending itself generated income, employment, industrial experience, and hard-won institutional learning. Removing dollars from the analysis leaves a narrower and more honest accounting of what was truly lost and what was gained.
SUMMARY
The strongest objection to this framing is that real resources are finite, even if money is not. Critics argue that Afghanistan reconstruction consumed labor, materials, and attention that could have been used at home.
This objection sounds persuasive, but it only holds if those resources were actually scarce.
The only “waste” is the federal collection of taxes, in the sense that the federal government creates dollars by spending and destroys dollars by collecting taxes.
Federal taxes do not fund federal spending. Their only purposes are to control the economy and to assure demand for the dollar. Federal spending never is a sign of waste.
We congratulate Florida politicians and those who vote for them on their unrelenting efforts to win Darwin Awards. May you achieve your goals as quickly as possible.
By Kate Payne | The Associated Press/Report for AmericaPUBLISHED: December 12, 2025 at 3:01 PM EST | UPDATED: December 12, 2025 at 4:19 PM EST
Jamie Schanbaum, whose legs and fingers were amputated after she contracted meningitis as a college student, testifies in support of vaccine mandates at a public hearing held by the Florida Department of Health on Friday in Panama City Beach. (Kate Payne/AP)
PANAMA CITY BEACH (AP) — Florida officials are plowing ahead with a proposal to roll back certain vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren, after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the state to become the first in the nation to eliminate all school vaccination requirements.
Pediatricians, infectious disease physicians and teachers have decried the push to undermine vaccines, which for generations have been a cornerstone of public health policy for keeping children and adults safe from potentially deadly — but preventable — diseases.
Experts have warned that doing away with the mandates could allow for a dangerous resurgence of preventable childhood diseases and deaths, amounting to a reversal of one of the greatest advancements in public health history.
Dozens of parents, physicians, educators and advocates crowded into a hotel conference room in Panama City Beach on Friday to testify on a rule change proposed by the Florida Department of Health that would eliminate requirements that Florida children receive the hepatitis B, varicella and Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib vaccines in order to attend public or private K-12 schools. The proposal also does away with a requirement for the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine for children attending child-care facilities.
Other state mandates related to vaccines for polio, mumps, tetanus and other diseases are enshrined in Florida law and would require legislative action to be rolled back.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long clashed with the medical establishment, has cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.
All U.S. states and territories require that children attending child-care centers and schools be vaccinated against a number of diseases, including, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox.
All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving certain vaccines. Most also permit exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.
Emotional public hearingFriday’s public hearing grew emotional at times, as parents and activists opposed to the mandates heralded the importance of personal freedom, while longtime physicians recalled hospital wards full of gravely sick children in the years before the widespread availability of vaccines.
Jamie Schanbaum’s legs and fingers were amputated after she contracted meningitis as a 20-year-old college student in Texas. She traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to testify in support of vaccines, recounting her seven-month hospital stay as she battled the vaccine-preventable disease and the challenges of living without her limbs.
“No one should go through this experience,” Schanbaum said.
“How about the relearning to use my hands? Feed myself? Wipe myself? This is the reality of what it’s like to survive something like this,” she added.
Rise of vaccine skepticismVaccination efforts across the country and around the world have stalled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw an explosion in vaccine skepticism. Florida’s proposal comes as U.S. Department of Health Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked to reshape the nation’s vaccine policies to match his long-standing suspicions about the safety and effectiveness of well-established shots.
Mary Helms, a mother and grandmother from Apalachicola, referenced Kennedy as she voiced her “full support” for rolling back the mandates.
“Medical choice and medical freedom in all ways is a God-given and sovereignhuman right,” Helms said.
Asked if the state consulted national medical experts such as the American Academy of Pediatrics on the rule development, a department representative declined to answer directly, stating: “the rule language is grounded in policy based on considerations that favor parental rights and medical freedom.”
Measles outbreak in South CarolinaFlorida’s push comes as a monthslong measles outbreak continues in South Carolina, almost entirely among school-age children.
State health officials there have said 116 of the 126 cases have been in children under 18, with two-thirds of them in children from age 5 to 17.
The outbreak has been centered in Spartanburg County, where just 90% of students have all the vaccinees required to be in school — one of the lowest ratesin South Carolina. The state has a religious exemptionfor vaccines, and almost all of the unvaccinated students use it.
Associated Press writer Jeffrey Collins contributed from Columbia, South Carolina. Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
You go, Florida. We’re all rooting for you to beat Spartanburg County, and every state in the union, to win your Darwin Awards.
We only feel bad for your innocent children, who are subject to your “God-given and sovereignhuman rights.”
The Darwin Awards project became formalized with the creation of a websitein 1993, followed by a series of books starting in 2000 by Wendy Northcutt. The criterion for the awards states: “In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.”
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 