Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 83. Sunrise is 5:43 and sunset is 8:18 for 14 hours 35 minutes of daylight. The moon is full today with all of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency is established.
A quick scheduling note: absent some unforeseen news, I’ll post tomorrow about groceries and municipal development.
No matter how enjoyable, how delightful, a trip to a faraway place, it’s always a moment of personal happiness to return to Whitewater. It’s sunny today, and yet even if it were stormy and gray, today would still be sunny for me.
Yesterday’s post addressed the burden of tariffs and trade wars on Wisconsin’s manufacturers. Far from making domestic manufacturing stronger, tariffs make it weaker. What could be worse, from the point of view of a tariff man (like the man who makes his home at Mar-a-Lago)?1 Tariffs and trade wars that drive domestic manufacturing to China would be worse:
On a dusty piece of land south of Bangkok, a flashlight factory stands full of promise. Workers hunch over tables gluing components. But only half the land has been built. Parts of the factory stand empty, waiting for future production lines.
The factory is owned by a Chinese manufacturer that makes flashlights for American customers. When President Trump’s tariffs on China hit 145 percent last year, companies embarked on a panicked search for cheaper alternatives in countries like Vietnam and Thailand, including this facility.
But since then, U.S. tariffs on China have come down sharply, leaving the leaders of some of those same companies with second thoughts.
“Have we pulled back to China? Yes, we have,” said Phil Laster, the chief operations officer of Alliance Consumer Group, a Texas-based company that sells flashlights made in the Thai factory to U.S. customers. Mr. Laster had encouraged the Chinese manufacturer, Ningbo Bright Electric, to build a factory outside China to make his products, but he is hitting the brakes on the strategy now that U.S. duties on Chinese goods are more comparable to those on products from Thailand.
See Alexandra Stevenson and Ana Swanson, Trump’s Tariffs Are Sending Some Companies Back to China (‘For some U.S. brands seeking a location for their factories, the economic logic is once again pointing to China’), New York Times, July 29, 2026.
Yesterday’s news: Tariffs are not returning manufacturing to America — they are undermining the manufacturing that’s here now. Today’s follow-up: Tariffs are not returning manufacturing to America — they are sending manufacturing to China.
The local gentlemen, among them landlords and lobbyists, who backed a candidate who loves national tariffs also want to tell you what’s best for the city’s economy.
Their candidate’s national policy is a laughable burden on the American economy; their local policy is self-interest dressed in whatever gaudy fast fashion they find lying in the trash.
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- If America had no trade conflicts with the world, then oil, other commodities, and manufactures could flow freely between nations, each supplying what it produces most cheaply and efficiently. ↩︎
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Development and Groceries, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Take a look at JetZero’s Z4, world’s first commercial all-wing airplane: