That’s the title of Wisconsin Policy Forum Focus #9 released earlier this week.
Here’s what Wisconsin imports in the way of goods:
Here’s what Wisconsin exports (from Wisconsin Policy Forum, Brief #6, 2025):
Notice that industrial machinery and electrical machinery are the top two categories in both imports and export; that’s intra-industry trade.
What these two graphs don’t tell you is what share of exports are accounted for by imported inputs. I don’t have this information at the Wisconsin state level but here are estimates at the national level. I’ve circled in red the corresponding categories, in the figure below.
Source: Slok, “Foreign value added in US exports,” Apollo, May 1, 2025.
Why is this important to Wisconsin. Assuming these ratios are representative for Wisconsin, this means that tariffs on imports into the US result in negative effective rate of protection for exports.
Consider an exported machine tool, which originally sold for $100,000 (under free trade). If a tariff of 10% is applied to imported inputs, of total value of $40,000. The Then the effective rate of protection is -6.7% (=((100,000-44,000)/60,000))-1). = 0.067.
Going to reality, if imported components account for about 12.5%, and a 30% tariff is applied to inputs (say they’re Chinese). then the effective rate of protection is -4.1%…
Here are Wisconsin imports through March:
Figure 1: Wisconsin goods imports in millions $ (blue), in millions 2000$ (tan), both seasonally adjusted. Series adjusted by author using X-13 in logs. Deflation using nationwide all-commodities price index. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BEA, BLS, NBER, and author’s calculations.
Treasury Secretary Bessent: “Most countries are negotiating in good faith except for the EU.”
Bessent seems to believe that Trump tweeting out tariffs of 10% then 20% then 10% then 25% then 50% at 2 AM is negotiating in “good faith”.
Bessent’s boss is suffering from dementia but all the press can talk about is that Biden is old. Biden taking a nap at 3 PM is better than Trump rage tweeting at 2 AM any day.
Roosevelt presided over a very successful U.S. engagement in WWII, with the incalculable help of Harry Hopkins. Both men had to crawl out of bed in order to work. Roosevelt died in office. Hopkins died shortly after the end of the war. Both men knew they were dying, both worked wonders. The idea that prostate cancer is somehow a bar to presiding over the U.S. government is silly.
Did Biden slow down toward the end? Yes. So did Reagan. And as you point out, the felon-in-chief is an mental mess. Only one of them is president today, and that makes him the critical object of journalistic attention. Jake Tapper winds up the whole journamalism profession to talk about his “Biden was sick” book, and so distracts from scrutiny of the felon-in-chief’s many weaknesses and flaws.
Same old “I got mine” behavior among elites in every profession.
Biden may have slowed down but at least he could still do the job, even if he took an afternoon nap. Instead you have Trump, on the morning before his call to Putin, prepping by rage tweeting at 3 AM about how Taylor Swift is no longer “hot”. I mean, this is gravely abnormal behavior for anyone, let alone the President. He is seriously mentally ill.
And Biden had smart, competent people backing him up. With Trump you have morons like Hegseth, Noem, Lutnick, Bondi, Duffy, McMahon, RFK and Gabbard. And then you have Bessent, hailed by the press as the adult in the room, tossing out absurdity after absurdity. If Bessent is the best of the bunch, what does that say about all the others? Lord help us if an unexpected crisis strikes because none of these people are up to the job.
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Bessent actually said this today: “Other countries’ currencies are rising, the dollar is not falling.”
I think he’s trying to make Krugman’s head explode.
You can see how that works, though (/s). If the dollar is falling, it’s because we did something bad to the dollar; if other currencies are rising, it’s not our fault, it’s because they did something good for their currencies.
This begs the question of why we don’t do the same good thing(s) for the dollar – then all the currencies can rise at the same time!!!!!!!