The U.S. collects $4.5T of income tax per year. The U.S. imports $3.8T per year. We’d have to self tax our imports at 120% to replace income tax with tariffs. Would you prefer your cost of living double in order to not pay any more income tax?

The head of our country’s government is in the early stages of consolidating total power. We must of course reject this, but that is not enough. We have to respond by creating a different and better kind of American politics than we have seen before.

It’s pretty insane that DOGE is already voluntarily lowering its guidance by -97% and it’s not even Easter yet. One of the biggest failures in political history. And it was *so* obvious both ex ante and ex post.

The White House today responded to a fact-check request regarding a President Trump lie by telling another lie. Trump, rejecting inflation concerns, claimed today that gas “hit $1.98 yesterday in a couple of states.” Not true. No state had an average gas price lower than $2.70 yesterday, per AAA data; no metro area in the 500+ tracked by AAA had an average below $2.57; and the firm GasBuddy tells me it saw 0 individual stations selling for under $2.19 in the tens of thousands of stations it tracks. (Certainly possible there’s some extreme outlier somewhere in this large country, and some drivers get special discounts, but that wouldn’t justify the claim.) So I asked the White House what if anything the president was talking about. Spokesperson Harrison Fields provided a statement that not only didn’t substantiate the false claim, which is understandable, but added a new false claim. Fields said that if out-of-touch big-city reporters actually went and visited “the Middle America,” they’d see that “gas prices are at record lows.” Except…that’s not close to true either. Gas prices “aren't near record lows in a single state,” @GasBuddyGuy notes, and that’s true even adjusted for inflation. Prices were much lower during various previous periods, even during Trump’s first term. They were under $1 at times in the late ‘90s, for one. So I had to send Fields a second request for comment, asking for an explanation for the new false claim the White House decided to provide in defense of the other false claim. No response a few hours in. This is really not how almost any office in Washington tends to operate with these kinds of routine fact-check requests. Spokespeople might ignore a query about their bosses’ misstatement, play down the wrongness, pivot to a broader “the real issue is” point, offer attempted defenses on and off record, maybe criticize the reporter. But just making up more stuff is pretty rare, or used to be.

Trump's IRS targeting Harvard? In honor of Tax Day, we found these old receipts

Leavitt April 8, 2025: Trump is not considering an extension or delay on tariffs. Leavitt April 9, 2025: Trump is putting a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs.

We have a showstopping #DrainoVersusDraino entry

This is just bonkers. Wtaf.