Tea at Trianon: Less Than Two Years of Trump Tariffs and Tax Cuts Generated $11.2 Trillion in US Investment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Less Than Two Years of Trump Tariffs and Tax Cuts Generated $11.2 Trillion in US Investment

From The Enterprise:

This month, in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, Hyundai and POSCO broke ground on a $5.8 billion electric-arc mill built to pour 2.7 million tons of automotive sheet metal a year. It is the first purpose-built automotive mill of its kind in the country, and it anchors Hyundai’s $26 billion American program. Officials put the local effect at 1,300 direct jobs and roughly 4,000 indirect ones, with the first coil targeted for 2029. The steel is meant for vehicle bodies assembled in Alabama and Georgia, coil that would otherwise have been stamped from imported steel. Contractors are already on the site in Ascension Parish.
The week before, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat down on CNBC and put a number on the wider map. The United States, he said, now holds $1.2 trillion in commitments to build semiconductors on American soil. When this administration took office, America produced less than 2% of the world’s chips. The path Lutnick described runs toward 40%, and toward 50% if Intel’s foundry holds.
Liberation Day tariffs put a charge on access to the American consumer and turned the world’s richest market from a free good into a scarce one. The July 2025 tax law then changed the plant’s return. 100% expensing of equipment and qualified production property lets a firm deduct the full cost of a factory in the year it builds it. Power finished the argument for the projects that swallow electricity. American energy abundance made the American data center and the American fab among the few sites that can feed an AI load at scale. European industrial power is still expensive, and several Asian grids cannot promise the same firm load on a construction calendar, which is why data centers and leading-edge semiconductor fabs keep landing here. Reciprocal trade frameworks did the last piece of work. Tariff relief became a multi-year investment vehicle from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Europe’s industrial champions. Lutnick stated the bargain plainly. If you make it here, you don't pay tariffs, but if you don't, be prepared to pay to enter the greatest market in the world. Kevin Hassett, the president’s economic adviser, added the tax half. Tariffs are pushing people to onshore activity, and expensing is making them want to invest like crazy. (Read more.)