Edward Lotterman

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dicken’s prescient assessment of the French Revolution fits the situation for our economy today.

Watching our economy go to hell is painful. But public desire to understand economic issues is at an all-time high. With President Donald Trump’s promised April 2 announcement of final tariffs looming over us, astute readers have asked about key issues. Here the most important ones:

Will tariffs close trade deficits?

No. The most important fact, often lost, in the whole situation is that if a nation consumes more goods and services than it produces, it must import more than it exports. That is not economic theory, it is grade school arithmetic. We can impose tariffs, but unless we increase savings by households, businesses or government, trade deficits will persist.

Could tariff revenue replace income tax revenue?

No, the relative magnitudes are just not right. U.S. imports of goods — physical things — total about $3.3 trillion a year. Personal income taxes come to $2.5 trillion. So a tariff of 75% on all imports could raise enough revenue to replace income taxes — as long as the quantity of imports did not decrease when tariffs were applied. Yet reducing imports is the very purpose of tariffs. So the revenue would not materialize. Moreover, tariffs of this magnitude would cause economic chaos.

Would China’s economy collapse if we stop buying from them?

This is a common belief, but the premise is off by a mile. Some 45 years after opening itself to trade, exporting manufactured goods to the world as a whole remains important to China. But as its overall economy has grown in recent decades, exports to the U.S. have shrunk in importance. China’s $427 billion in exports of physical goods to the U.S. in 2023 were only 2.4% of its $17.8 trillion in total output.

Is it true that Ireland has “taken advantage” of the U.S., as Trump says?

Trump specifically was addressing how many U.S. companies, especially medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, have nominally moved their headquarters to Ireland to evade U.S. taxes. Our own Medtronic was one of them. This does reduce U.S. tax revenues and employment marginally. It doesn’t reduce availability of products to U.S. consumers or returns to stockholders.

The background is broader. Trump believes that any country exporting more to the U.S. than importing from us is taking advantage of us. This is a common misconception, but is just plainly false.

Where can one get information about U.S. trade balances with specific countries?

Search the internet for “U.S. Trade in Goods by Country” and census.gov to find imports and exports by month and year for nearly 200 countries going back to 1985 in most cases. The site also explains trade terms and gives other info.

What tariffs does the U.S. itself actually impose on imports?

Search for “Harmonized Tariff Schedule.” This is a mind-numbingly complex document, but a half-hour scrolling through it teaches one a lot. Its 97 chapters on various categories include “Chapter 66: Umbrellas, sun umbrellas, walking sticks, seatsticks, whips, riding-crops and parts thereof.”

The “Notes” at the beginning of the whole document have much information about the tariff system and a list of the nearly 30 trade agreements we participate in.

What is an “ad valorum” tariff?

An ad valorum tariff is a percentage of the value of the import rather than a money amount per physical unit.

In ancient Greece or Rome, a tariff perhaps was two silver coins per amphora of olive oil. That was a “specific tariff” and these still exist. The U.S. still charges 1.5 cents per kilo of some green teas, for example.

But specific tariffs are problematic. Should the number of cents per pound be the same for coarse carpet wool as for fine wool for luxury apparel? On common rebar steel vs. chrome-vanadium alloy steel for drill bits? And what about inflation? A $12 per ton tariff in 1967 effectively would fallen to only $4 a ton adjusted for inflation in 1982.

It’s much simpler to just set tariffs as a percentage of value.

What is a “quota?”

A quota is a physical quantity limit instead of a tax. For example, from 1974 to 1994 there was an International Multi-Fibers Arrangement covering thread, cloth and finished clothing exported from poor countries to rich ones. The rich ones agreed to accept fixed quantities, or quotas. The U.S. might admit 10 million dozens of sweaters with no tariff or a reduced one. Most quota systems were phased out by the World Trade Organization.

However, a variation called “tariff-rate quotas” is at the center of Trump’s attacks on Canada. Such quotas set a low tariff on some initial quantity. But the rate steps up to a higher level on imports above some quantity threshold. It might be 8% of value on the first 500,000 units passing customs, but 25% of value after.

Trump also has been complaining about Canada charging 250% tariffs on U.S. dairy exports. This is sheer rubbish.

Both countries subsidize their dairy farmers, but in different ways. Our free trade agreements always have clauses to prevent imports from upsetting such programs. Canada limits milk production to raise prices for farmers. While Canada allows some imports of most U.S. dairy products at zero or low tariffs, rates jump sharply higher after a threshold. These are ones Trump cites. However, the thresholds are so high that they have never been reached in the decades with the agreements have been in place. It is a non-issue but that does not matter to Trump.

Do countries ever place tariffs on their own exports?

Yes, although rarely in modern days. Populist governments in Argentina, for example, have put tariffs on exports of agricultural products as a way to tax land owners.

However these are impossible for the United States. Our constitution’s Article I, Section 9, Clause 5 states: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” This was demanded by southern states that feared northern, manufacturing-state majorities in Congress would tax southern-state exports of tobacco, rice and indigo.

How will U.S. automakers be affected, given U.S. and Canadian integration?

This huge issue would be obvious to anyone who ever was asked at an auto parts store whether the 351 cubic inch engine in their Ford was a 351C made in Cleveland or a 351W made in Windsor, Ontario. These were two completely different engines, and yet each was installed in sundry Ford vehicles at assembly plants in both countries.

Long before any blanket free trade agreement, the U.S. and Canada allowed the auto industry to operate tariff-free across the border with component plants and assembly plants on both sides. A famous study followed a raw copper cathode from a refinery in Texas to Canada where it was rolled into bars that went to Indiana to make cores for starter armatures that went to Ohio to be machined and wound with wire, in turn to the starter plant itself in Ontario, which sent finished units to Michigan to be bolted into Plymouth Slant Six engines that were put in cars and pickups on multiple assembly lines in both countries.

Obviously if you applied a 25% Trump tariff or a retaliatory Canadian one each time something like this crossed the border, the total paid would be many times the cost of the component itself. This is an example of a “cascading tariff.” These can be reduced with agreements to give credit for taxes paid in earlier steps, but still is the height of folly.

If nothing is done to mitigate this, after imposed, costs of autos manufactured under a system that worked very well over more than 60 years necessarily will rise more than from a simple 25% on the final vehicle. Manufacturers can scramble to set up separate production chains in each country, but this will kneecap efficiency. That is the kind of “deadweight loss” benefitting no one inherent in any trade restriction.

What tariffs does China apply to imports?

Chinese tariffs have fallen sharply over the last 35 years from an average 30% in 1990 to 2.1% in 2023. But such overall averages are misleading. As for many other nations, China does not impose tariffs on many raw materials needed by its industries. So most Chinese imports of coal, iron ore, soybeans, grains and crude oil are not taxed at all, but manufactured goods are hit with higher rates. And since Trump started a trade war in his first administration with tariffs that President Joe Biden largely left in place, U.S. exports to China now face tariffs that are higher than those imposed on the rest of the world.

This illustrates an important detail in trade data tabulations. Weighted average tariff rates may be calculated from dividing tariff revenues by the value of all imports. Or they may divide tariff revenues by the “value of all dutiable merchandise” that excludes raw materials or other goods admitted duty-free. Be sure to find which one applies to numbers cited.

What is “trade in services?”

Services are non-tangible things like insurance, transport, travel and tourism, engineering and construction, royalties for use of patents, copyright income from movies and television programs.

These are not new. Insurance was a major export for Holland and for Swiss cantons in the 1600s and for Baltimore and Philadelphia by 1800. Hollywood movies already brought money to the U.S. in the 1920s. Telenovela rights bring payments to Brazil from around the world.

The U.S. imports more physical goods from the rest of the world than it exports, but we export substantially more services than we import. In 2023, we exported $2.018 trillion in physical goods and imported $3.080 trillion. For services, we exported $1.026 trillion and imported $748 billion.

In general, it is harder to tabulate the value of trade in services since they don’t pass through customs anywhere and must be gleaned from corporate financial statements. Most payments for ocean shipping are made to shell companies in Liberia and Panama, but the ship owners are elsewhere.

(For details, search for census.gov and “U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (FT900)” . Downloadable files are in “Exhibit 3- U.S. Exports of Services” and “Exhibit 4- U.S. Imports of Services” )

What does “effective rate of protection” mean?

This deals with how much a given tariff allows for higher labor costs and is a critical issue in current policy debates. It is key to how much Trump’s tariffs will allow U.S. firms to charge higher prices.

Consider a simple fabricated metal product like modular scaffolding. These require steel, semi-skilled labor and basic welding and metalworking machines. They are made in two countries with differing labor costs, say Brazil and the U.S. Assume the costs of steel and machinery are at the same world prices for both. These total $70 per scaffold frame for both producers. However production-line wages and front-office salaries differ.

Assume that factories in Brazil can produce a scaffold frame for $100. In the U.S., the breakeven costs are $110. We then impose a 25% tariff that boosts prices of imported Brazilian ones to $125. Our companies can now charge $15 more and still meet import competition. However, that $15 boost on a base of $40 in wages and salaries is a 37.5% increase on the costs that actually differ between the countries. So a nominal 25% tariff on a product give an “effective rate of protection” for U.S. wages that is higher than the announced tariff rate. This situation applies to nearly all U.S. imports of manufactured goods from lower-wage countries.

This is a good start. Get your popcorn ready to watch the next act of this play — whether tragedy or farce — on April 2.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By Stephanie Yang, Los Angeles Times

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A small-town hockey player who’s become a national superstar, a high-school sweetheart who’s scrubbing toilets, and a secret that will change everything:

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“He can never find out that he has a daughter!”

The series pilot for “Breaking the Ice” has all the hallmarks of a dramatic, and cheesy, saga of deception and betrayal — all in 132 seconds, the perfect length for the TikTok and Reels generation (the many mini episodes of “Ice” have generated 272.9 million views).

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to know how this ends,’” said Shannon Swicegood, a 31-year-old mom in Columbia, South Carolina, scrolling to watch the next two episodes on the ReelShort app.

The shows, known as micro dramas or vertical dramas, are reminiscent of soap operas or telenovelas, but they’re typically divided into 50-100 tiny chapters. Users can unlock new episodes by watching ads, paying per clip or signing up for unlimited viewing. Swicegood, for example, pays a $200 annual fee to ReelShort for continuous access to the stuff of romance novels: windswept hair, smoldering stares, glittery ingenues and adorable children who may ask: “Are you really my daddy?”

Her husband likes to tease her for watching her “dirty little shows,” with their outlandish and corny plot lines. But Swicegood believes they are filling a void among the streaming networks. “I don’t feel like (the streamers) are coming out with anything that appeals to the demographic I’m in,” Swicegood said. “Instead of sitting down and trying another show about someone solving a crime, I can pull up ReelShorts and just watch two people fall in love.”

Micro dramas emerged in China just as watching short, vertical videos on smartphones became a cornerstone of everyday life. According to DataEye, a digital research firm based in Shenzhen, revenue from micro dramas reached $6.9 billion in China last year, surpassing domestic box office sales for the first time. Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm that tracks mobile app data, reports that short-drama apps outside China made $1.2 billion in 2024, with 60% of that coming from the U.S.

By comparison, the U.S. box office revenue was about $8.75 billion in 2024.

For now, the U.S. micro drama market is dominated by Silicon Valley-based ReelShort, which has outpaced more than 40 international rival apps in mobile downloads and revenue, according to a report last year from Sensor Tower.

Five years ago, another U.S. company, Quibi, famously launched by Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenburg, tried to remake the business of short-form video, but the effort shut down fewer than seven months after its launch. Investors were told that the service failed to attract viewers willing to pay to watch its shows. Will this wave of new platforms be able to reconfigure the global entertainment industry as it struggles with streaming wars, rising production costs and a sluggish return to theaters?

: : :

A funeral for a young woman who was destined to be married off to a divorced pig farmer, a horrified crowd that watches her rise from the dead — and a terrifying realization.

“I’ve traveled through time!”

The first episode of “I Became a Stepmother in the 1980s” got Selina Huang hooked on micro dramas. Their popularity surged during the pandemic, and Huang, a 20-year-old college student in Xi’an, China, became obsessed with the short mobile shows during a holiday break with her family. “The way they could quickly stir up emotions made us so excited that we just couldn’t stop,” she said. “It was like a whole new world for us.”

Their brevity also meant that she could fit a show in during meal time or between classes once she returned to school — though, at times, starting a series before bed would lead to an unintended all-nighter.

She said she spends about $1.40 to $2.75 to access a full show when she’s too impatient to wait through ads and estimates she’s watched more than 100 titles.

Joyce Yen, a producer and former screenwriter in China, moved into the micro drama industry in 2022. Compared to a traditional television or streaming show, vertical dramas are significantly cheaper to produce, he said. A series of about 20 or 30 episodes, each about half an hour long, could cost upwards of $8 million. A micro drama series could be shot for as little as $14,000, though he said the average is closer to $110,000.

Cassandra Yang, founder of a Chinese micro drama content distribution and licensing company called RisingJoy, points out that micro dramas can make a profit within one or two months, compared to movies made for the big screen.

“It is a very exciting signal for us compared with the traditional film and the traditional TV series, because it has more flexibility and more imagination,” said Yang, who was the head of content at Turner Broadcasting System in China before it closed in 2019.

For now, most micro dramas that RisingJoy distributes are made in China, where the nascent industry is the most mature. But eventually, Yang believes, localizing production will be necessary to better expand in promising markets including Japan, Korea and Singapore.

In the meantime, the U.S. is one of the fastest growing markets for micro dramas, along with Indonesia, Brazil, India and Mexico.

“I think every region has great potential,” Yang said. “But I have to say, everyone wants in on the U.S. market, because the ROI is better.”

ReelShort CEO Joey Jia says the greatest advantage of micro dramas is the ability to constantly adapt based on how audiences respond to the platform’s content. He founded the studio seven years ago, but it took a while to figure out what worked. The company pivoted from mobile gaming to interactive stories to mini dramas. Back then, he said the app’s retention rate was near single digits, and 80% of dramas failed to gain an audience.

Producing many variations of similar story structures to see which ones succeeded led the company to a content library that is filled with titles like “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” (451.2 million views), “Playing by the Billionaire’s Rules” (26 million views) and “Baby Trapped by the Billionaire” (32.9 million views).

“We know which story can make more money and which story has problems,” Jia said. “That’s the missing portion for traditional Hollywood. They don’t have a feedback loop.”

Jia estimates that ReelShort released almost 200 titles last year, and aims to double that this year. In September, the company opened a studio in Los Angeles. He said that while he believes some content — such as franchises that rely heavily on a fictional world or characters like Star Wars or James Bond — is ill-suited for micro dramas, he hopes to expand into other genres like science fiction or reality TV.

“The biggest question is, ‘How fast can the micro drama evolve?’” he asked. “I still see the short drama as a baby that grew up very fast.”

Katherine Ford, a 47-year-old grade school teacher in Kernersville, North Carolina, would eventually like to see ReelShorts expand its content as well.

After she ran out of English titles, she started watching Asian micro dramas, which she said generally have better acting, writing and production values. She hopes that in the next six months they can branch out more, to period dramas or old Westerns or stories featuring plus-sized women.

For now, she’s paying $5 a week to replay her favorites dozens of times, including “Playing by the Billionaire’s Rules,” “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” and “Baby Trapped by the Billionaire.”

Ford’s family also subscribes to Netflix, Disney+ and Peacock. But if it came down to choosing one, Ford doesn’t know if she could give up ReelShort. “I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s my guilty pleasure watch and I enjoy it, even though it’s sometimes really cheesy.”

(Los Angeles Times special correspondent Xin-yun Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.)

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Amanda Hernández, Stateline.org

Firearm-related deaths among children and teenagers in the United States have risen sharply in recent years, increasing by 50% since 2019.

In 2023, firearms remained the leading cause of death among American youth for the third year in a row, followed by motor vehicle accidents, according to the latest mortality data released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The data shows 2,581 children aged 17 and under died from firearm-related incidents in 2023, including accidents, homicides and suicides, with a national rate of nearly four gun deaths per 100,000 children.

Young people in the United States were killed by firearms at a rate nearly three times higher than by drowning. This means that for every child who died from drowning in 2023, nearly three died from gun violence.

“Every single number is a life lost — is a kid that won’t go back home,” said Silvia Villarreal, the director of research translation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Children, she added, are an inherently vulnerable population, and this vulnerability is even more pronounced among children of color.

Black children and teens in 2023 were more than eight times as likely to die from firearm homicide than their white peers. Since 2015, firearms have been the leading cause of death for Black youth, according to CDC data.

Since 2018, firearm suicide rates have been highest among American Indian or Alaska Native and white children and teens. In 2023, American Indian and Alaska Native youth had the highest firearm suicide rate of any racial group.

Youth gun deaths don’t just affect family members, close loved ones and friends; they ripple through entire communities, making it difficult for people to heal, Villarreal told Stateline.

“Communities that have suffered really high-impact losses are never the same, and I don’t know if it’s possible to be ever the same as it was before,” Villarreal said.

One of the major policies championed by gun control and safety groups to address youth gun violence is safe storage laws, which establish guidelines for how firearms should be stored in homes, vehicles and other properties. In recent years, some states also have proposed and adopted measures to create tax credits for purchasing gun safes.

Twenty-six states have child access prevention and secure storage laws on the books, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control research and advocacy group.

A report released in July by RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, found that laws designed to limit children’s access to stored firearms may help reduce firearm suicides, unintentional shootings and firearm homicides among youth.

This year, lawmakers in states across the country — including in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin — have considered gun storage policies.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Jeremy Reynolds, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

Playing music for plants can help them to grow, and it turns out that the same might be true for humans.

In a new study published in the peer-reviewed science journal Chaos, researchers played classical music for third-trimester fetuses using headphones on the mothers’ stomachs and measured the fetuses’ heart rates.

They found that the vibrations from the music helped to stabilize the fetuses’ heart rates, which researchers said “could stimulate the development of the fetal autonomic nervous system.”

The study, “Response to music on the nonlinear dynamics of human fetal heart rate fluctuations,” is another in a long line of studies suggesting that listening to classical music can, among other things, help people develop spatial-temporal skills or aid in scheduling and ordering tasks like packing a car trunk full of suitcases on the first try. A true superpower.

The scientific literature on music is historically murky, however, with lots of correlative and anecdotal data and studies with small sample sizes. The new Chaos study only analyzed data from 37 pregnant women and also noted that the babies’ hearts stabilized more to the sound of Spanish guitar than to orchestral music.

But as science has developed new ways to image the brain and body, researchers are gaining clarity on the specific ways music affects us.

Lately, much of that research has concentrated on childhood development and the therapeutic aspects of listening to and learning to play music, and 2025 has seen a spate of data emerging about music and pregnancy.

Sonata snacks

The study about fetal heart rates follows in the footsteps of a 2023 study published in Scientific Reports that found that listening to Beethoven’s music live synchronized listeners heart rates and breathing. This was particularly true when listeners were emotionally moved by the music:

“There were links between the bodily synchrony and aesthetic experiences: synchrony, especially heart-rate synchrony, was higher when listeners felt moved emotionally and inspired by a piece, and were immersed in the music,” researchers wrote in “Audience synchronies in live concerts illustrate the embodiment of music experience.”

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For the fetal study, researchers only used two pieces of music. First was “The Swan” by French composer Camille Saint-Saens, himself a musical prodigy, with its serene, flowing cello solo. And then came “Arpa de Oro,” by Mexican composer Abundio Martínez, a pensive guitar melody with a groovier bass.

The latter produced more regular and predictable heart rate patterns, according to the study.

Pregnant mothers, too, have reported benefits to listening to calming music. An Indonesian journal in January published a paper found that “Classical music therapy has been shown to be effective in reducing anxiety in pregnant women.”

But again, the sample size was only 30 women.

The paper, “Classical Music Interventions to Reduce Anxiety in Pregnancy,” also had a few translation issues, but its conclusion doesn’t seem farfetched based on other published research. For example, a larger literature review published in August in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology MFM found that “a general positive effect of music interventions on maternal stress resilience,” but noted that the genre of the music wasn’t as relevant as whether the women enjoyed the music or not.

The actual takeaway: Listening to music you like might be good for your health.

The Mozart effect

Back in 1998, Georgia Governor Zell Miller, was so taken with the idea that he tried to use state funding to send every baby born in Georgia a cassette tape or CD of classical music.

The idea is as seductive as it is silly. It appeals to parents’ natural desire to give their kids a developmental leg up, and it appeals to classical record labels and producers who sought to cash in on the so-called Mozart effect.

Then again, another study, “A systematic review of the Mozart effect in adult and paediatric cases of drug-resistant epilepsy,” this one published in Epilepsy & Behavior found that children and adults alike experienced reduced seizures when exposed to a Mozart duet for two pianos, which the researchers are also terming a Mozart effect.

The literature does indicate that passively listening to music can help kids manage anxiety and that actively studying an instrument can have all sorts of far-reaching benefits like improving executive function, or the ability to prioritize and accomplish daily tasks and make decisions.

And this, in turn, can have all sorts of far reaching effects in terms of development and career and even the ability to bond, socially. The Mozart effect may not be as simple as we once thought, but it certainly bears further probing.

Jeremy Reynolds’ work at the Post-Gazette is supported in part by a grant from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Getty Foundation and Rubin Institute.

©2025 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.