Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 88. Sunrise is 5:43 and sunset is 8:18, for 14 hours, 35 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1958, President Eisenhower signs into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Not smarter, definitely harder:
As President Donald Trump prepares to announce new tariff increases, the costs of his policies are starting to come into focus for a domestic manufacturing sector that depends on global supply chains, with a new analysis suggesting factory costs could increase by roughly 2% to 4.5%.
“There’s going to be a cash squeeze for a lot of these firms,” said Chris Bangert-Drowns, the researcher at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth who conducted the analysis. Those seemingly small changes at factories with slim profit margins, Bangert-Drowns said, “could lead to stagnation of wages, if not layoffs and closures of plants” if the costs are untenable.
The analysis, released Tuesday, points to the challenges Trump might face in trying to sell his tariffs to the public as a broader political and economic win and not just as evidence his negotiating style gets other nations to back down. The success of Trump’s policies ultimately depends on whether everyday Americans become wealthier and factory towns experience revivals, a goal outside economists say his Republican administration is unlikely to meet with tariffs.
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The Washington Center for Equitable Growth analysis shows how Trump’s devotion to tariffs carries potential economic and political costs for his agenda. In the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, more than 1 in 5 jobs are in the critical sectors of manufacturing, construction, mining and oil drilling and maintenance that have high exposures to his import taxes.
The artificial intelligence sector Trump last week touted as the future of the economy is dependent on imports. More than 20% of the inputs for computer and electronics manufacturing are imported, so the tariffs could ultimately magnify a hefty multitrillion-dollar price tag for building out the technology in the U.S.
See Josh Boak and Paul Wiseman, Trump’s tariffs could squeeze US factories and boost costs by up to 4.5%, a new analysis finds, Associated Press, July 29,2025.
It’s improbable that most Trump supporters will care about higher prices under Trump. All the excitement, all the thrill, of right-wing populism was and is, in any event, cultural. The movement was, and will always be, a cultural and ethnic revenge fantasy made real. Prices will be higher for everyone, but die-hards and dead-enders will consider those prices worth the cost of their culture war.
Drone footage captures scale of wildfires in Turkey’s Bursa province: