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Tuesday was National Agriculture Day, and President Donald Trump was on it:

Our Nation was founded by farmers. Our independence was won by farmers. And our continent was tamed by farmers. Our farmers always lead the way — we are PROUD of them, and we are DELIVERING for them! #NationalAgricultureDay

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2018

But while Trump talks about “delivering for” American farmers, the most significant economic policy to come out of the White House so far this year stands to hurt farmers—and businesses dependent on farming—more than many other sectors of the economy. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported steel will increase the cost of farming equipment and cut into farmers’ bottom lines, and the tariff might trigger a trade war that could cut off American exports to Europe and China.

“There’s not a day on the farm when a farmer doesn’t touch steel,” Rep. David Young (R-Iowa) told Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin during a House Appropriations Committee hearing earlier this month. “The agriculture industry is worried about these tariffs on aluminum and steel.”

Young joined the rest of Iowa’s congresssional delegation in sending a letter to the White House earlier this month urging Trump to reconsider the tariff “given the consequences this will have on states like Iowa, rural communities throughout the nation, and on America’s farms.”

While Iowa is best known for its farms (and its caucuses), the state’s manufacturing industry is also worried about the potential consequences of tariffs. More than 3,000 factories are scattered across the state, according to the Des Moines Register, and many of them make the equipment used on farms in Iowa and across the Midwest. Steve Sukup, CFO of Sukup Manufacturing, which employs about 600 Iowans to make steel grain bins and dryers, tells the Register that tariffs are “a step backward” after tax and regulatory reforms helped businesses like his.

Agriculture industries are hardly alone in fearing Trump’s tariffs. Artificially inflating the price of imported steel will hurt businesses across a wide swath of the economy. According to 2015 Census data, steel mills employed about 140,000 Americans and added about $36 billion to the economy that year, but steel-consuming industries employed more than 6.5 million Americans and added $1 trillion to the economy. In other words, for every steel-producing job in the country that might benefit from Trump’s proposed tariffs, 46 steel-consuming jobs are put at risk. Everything from cars to housing will be affected. According to a policy brief released by the Trade Partnership, a Washington-based pro-trade think tank, Trump’s tariffs will wipe out about 179,000 jobs.

Farmers and lawmakers from farming states are particularly worried about the prospect of retaliatory tariffs being imposed by Europe, China, and others targeted by Trump’s steel and aluminum levies. American agricultural products would be an easy target for retaliation, because America has a large trade surplus with many other nations. For example, 60 percent of the soybeans grown in Iowa end up being shipped to China.

“Strong, fair trade favors American families and businesses,” the Iowa lawmakers wrote in their letter to the White House, “and allows them to export their goods, which is critical for the farmers, manufacturers, and insurers in our state.”

Soybean exports were already in a precarious state, according to Peter Meyer, senior director of agricultural analytics at S&P Global Platts, which advises investors about commodity markets. Writing at The Hill, he warns that fewer exports to China would wreak havoc on American farmers.

“The fragile U.S. economy cannot afford a trade war with China,” he says. “No one should legitimately believe that political promises made in one area will not have an effect in another.”

Trump seems to think so. Trade wars are “good, and easy to win,” the president infamously tweeted shortly before launching his steel tariffs. In the factories and fields of Iowa, that feeling is not shared.

“There hasn’t been a trade war we’ve won,” Sukup tells the Register. “And we have the most to lose from it.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is spitting mad at Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director who does double duty heading up an agency whose creation Warren championed: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB’s previous director was an ideological ally of Warren. Since Mulvaney took over Warren has ripped the agency’s decisions. Warren said Mulvaney is giving “the middle finger” to consumers, and she railed at Mulvaney’s indifferent response to the 10 (!) letters she has sent him demanding answers to more than 100 questions.

The other day she tweeted that she is giving Mulvaney “one last chance.” Yet as The Wall Street Journal points out, she has only herself to blame for her apparent impotence.

Time and again during debate over the CFPB, conservatives and libertarians warned that its powers were too great and that its accountability to the other branches of government was too limited. But that was just the way Warren and other supporters wanted things. Neither Congress nor other political forces could influence an unaccountable regulatory agency. Now Warren finds herself thwarted by the very lack of oversight she championed. A. Barton Hinkle explains more.

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Loyola University Chicago students were furious when school officials cut off comedian Hannibal Buress’s mic just a few minutes into his routine on at a university-sponsored performance Saturday night.

Buress had begun by calling attention to the agreement the university had forced him to sign as a condition of giving a performance: It prohibited him from talking about rape, sexual assault, race, or sexual orientation. Buress, who is black, often incorporates politically charged themes in his material.

A few minutes into his routine, Buress made a joke about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, which prompted school officials to kill his audio, according to the Loyola Phoenix. Loyola is a Catholic university.

“Loyola University Chicago cut the mic on Hannibal Buress’s performance Saturday, March 17, because he violated the mutually agreed upon content restriction clause in his contract,” Loyola spokesperson Evangeline Politis tells Reason via email. “It is standard for the University to include a content restriction clause in entertainment contracts; Buress is the only entertainer to disregard the clause to the degree that his mic was cut.”

Buress attempted to perform without a mic, so officials reportedly turned up the background music to drown him out. He then left the stage for 15 minutes. Students in the audience began chanting “Hannibal” in protest of the university’s decision. Finally, the comedian was allowed to finish his performance.

Since Loyola is a private university, it is within its rights to impose conditions on would-be performers. But there are plenty of reasons to think a blanket ban on speakers addressing controversial subjects is a terrible thing for a university to enforce. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Bill Rickards writes:

So one has to wonder, how well does Loyola handle the full thrust of public debate if this is how it responds to jokes about a sore subject for the Catholic Church?

When universities impose restrictions on a performer’s speech like this, whatever their legal right, it is important to consider the implications of those restrictions and the question of what is accomplished by enforcing them. Comedy, in particular, is an art that often drives social change, allowing a speaker to set aside—or indeed poke at—discomfort around sensitive or charged subjects in order to challenge ideas and powerful people or institutions. For example, Buress sparked renewed public attention to allegations of sexual assault by Bill Cosby. Do academic institutions serve themselves well when they invite comedians to perform and entertain, so long as they don’t challenge those institutions?

Everyone who opposes mandatory trigger warnings in the classroom should be similarly concerned about an administration enforcing “content restrictions.”

• A suspect in a recent string of bombings in Austin, Texas, was killed during a standoff with police early Wednesday morning.
• The art of the (arms) deal: After Congress met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to talk about his country’s role in civil war and strife in Yemen, President Trump urged the prince to buy more U.S. weapons and military equipment, saying the Saudi’s current $12.5 billion purchase is “peanuts.”
• Former model Karen McDougal is suing to be released from a nondisclosure agreement she signed with American Media Inc, parent company of the tabloid The National Enquirer. McDougal alleges that the company—whose chief exec David Pecker is a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s—paid her $150,000 in 2016 to keep quiet about a “10-month romantic relationship with Donald Trump” McDougal’d had a decade earlier.
• A European Union plan to tax tech companies on revenue, not profit, could hike the tax burden on companies by hundreds of millions.
• Russia’s top court says popular encrypted messaging app Telegram must hand over user data when requested by Russian security services.
• Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was charged with third-degree murder for and second-degree manslaughter for fatally shooting Justine Damond, an Australian woman who had called police to her home to report a sexual assault.

During a visit to New Hampshire on Monday, Donald Trump gave a 19-minute speech about opioid abuse in which he used the word tough or variations of it 19 times, more than four times as often as he used the word smart. That ratio seems about right, Jacob Sullum says, given the details of the president’s plan to end “this scourge of drug addiction in America” and “raise a drug-free generation of American children.”

Trump’s plan is heavy on tactics that have already failed, Sullum notes, including propaganda aimed at scaring kids away from drugs, heavy penalties for dealers, and interdiction at the border. Trump also wants to intensify the crackdown on prescription opioids, which hurts pain patients and drives nonmedical users toward deadlier substances.

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President Trump’s pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Politicians from most of the world’s nations signed the deal, and President Obama said “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.” Unfortunately, observes John Stossel, Trump often reverses himself. That’s why it’s good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

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A Romanian court has told Constantin Reliu he is dead and there’s nothing he can do about it. Reliu left the country to work in Turkey in 1992. After not hearing from him for years, his wife had him declared dead. Turkey deported him last year. When he got back to Romania, he found he was officially dead. The court said that decision can’t be overturned.

• Police say that the self-driving Uber vehicle is not at fault in yesterday’s deadly collision with a pedestrian. The Washington Post‘s Megan McArdle argues it’s far too soon to tell if self-driving cars are safer than their human-piloted alternatives.

• Trump congratulates Putin on his election win, suggests the two will meet in “the not-too-distant future.”

• School shooter in Maryland injures two before being killed by armed school resource officer.

• The Senate is set to vote on a resolution withdrawing U.S. personnel from supporting Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen.

• Rep. Liz Cheney’s sole Republican primary challenger in the race for the state’s single Congressional seat criticizes her for praising torture, saying “we’re a really red state. We’re crusty, old conservative cowboys and miners, and we’re rough and tough and opinionated, but we are not torturers”

• California governor Jerry Brown says high-speed rail critiques are “bullshit.”

Congressional leaders hope to vote on a new spending bill by the end of Thursday, a day before the deadline to avoid another government shutdown.

The $1.3 billion bill will fund the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. According to reports from Politico, CNBC, and other outlets, big ticket items still being negotiated include how much to spend on President Donald Trump’s border-wall pet project, how much to spend on a new train tunnel linking New Jersey with New York City, and whether to include protections for immigrants who came to America illegally as children.

You know what’s almost entirely absent from the discussion? Any concern for America’s long-term fiscal health.

To be fair, the right time to have that discussion was probably earlier this year, before Congress passed the budget deal that paved the way for this bill. The omnibus package set to pass this week fills in specific line items, while the budget outlines spending priorities in broad strokes. But instead of addressing any deeper fiscal issues, lawmakers voted to raise spending caps and add to the national debt.

The current budget plan will add an estimated $1.7 trillion to the federal debt in the next decade, and it will cause the Treasury to run a trillion-dollar deficit every year for the foreseeable future, according to a nonpartisan analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Because tax cuts passed late last year reduced future government revenues, higher spending in coming years will have a dramatic effect on America’s national debt. The committee projects that annual interest spending on the national debt will rise from $263 billion in 2017 to $965 billion by 2028.

Not everyone in the government is ignoring the problem. David Malpass, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for international affairs, told Fox Business last month that he’s increasingly troubled by huge budget deficits. “I think it is too high now, and it’s going higher,” he said of the national debt.

It’s going higher, in part, because of quick succession with which Republicans approved tax cuts and massive spending increases, a combination that undercut an argument Republicans have used for years to push for lower taxes. Only by cutting government revenue could spending be brought under control, the argument went. That logic seems to have misunderstood just how disconnected revenue has become from spending—even among Republican officials who spent a good portion of the past decade talking about the need for fiscal restraint.

“It turns out that tax cuts did not starve the beast,” writes Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “The beast simply grabbed a plate of deficit-finance and continued eating.”

If cutting taxes can’t bring spending under control, the last, best hope lies with voters. A February poll from Rasmussen Reports found that 77 percent of likely voters think politicians’ unwillingness to cut spending is more to blame for the budget deficit than taxpayers’ unwillingness to pay more in taxes. Voters also say they want Congress to balance the budget, Rasmussen reports, but they generally believe that won’t happen.

The usual caveats apply here. First, it’s not surprising that a poll of voters found that voters think politicians are the problem. A poll of politicians would probably show that they think voters’ unwillingness to pay more in taxes is a larger part of the problem. Second, voters in aggregate usually agree that they want to pay less in taxes and see the government spend less—but it’s difficult to get a consensus on what, exactly, should be cut.

Foreign aid usually polls well as a target for spending cuts, but it accounts for a teeny, tiny share of federal spending. If you’re serious about getting the federal deficit under control, you need serious cuts to the Pentagon and to entitlements—and election after election shows that, given the choice, voters tend to back candidates who promise to increase spending in those areas while railing against proposed cuts.

Indeed, the federal government could eliminate all spending except entitlement programs and the interest on the federal debt, and the budget still would not be balanced.

If voters call for bringing deficits under control and for cutting spending—not only in surveys, but at the ballot box—there’s perhaps some small hope that the trend of higher spending and more borrowing can be reversed. In the meantime, Congress appears ready to gorge itself with massive spending increases that will drive the national debt to new highs.

When I wrote recently about D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposal to ban bump stocks, I noted that the legislation would be entirely strategic and/or symbolic, since D.C.’s gun laws already outlaw most guns that can be readily fitted with a bump stock.

But I was still curious about how many illegal bump-stock-compatible wepaons there might be in the District. So I sent a Freedom of Information Act request to D.C. government asking for details on the district’s illegal guns.

In response I received a spreadsheet from the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS), which forensically processes illegal guns that fall into the hands of the city police. The spreadsheet details the make, model, and caliber of 2,192 guns processed in 2017.

Here are a few things I learned from the data:

1) Very few of the guns on the list were bump-stock-compatible.

First, a disclaimer: Determining whether a gun will accept a bump stock is not always a straightforward yes/no classification. The question is complicated by homemade bump stocks, custom fabrications, and the like. For these purposes, I called a gun “bump-stock-compatible” only if it was a semi-automatic AR-15 or AK-47 pattern rifle or carbine. Those types of firearms are, as far as I could determine, the only ones for which bump fire stocks are currently manufactured and sold at any kind of mass-market scale.

Using those parameters, I found just 27 guns on the list of 2,192 which were bump-stock-compatible. That’s 1.2 percent, which suggests it is unlikely that D.C. has a significant problem with bump stocks being used in crimes.

2) Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority were pistols.

Amidst national debates about mass shootings, bump stocks, and “assault weapons,” it often seems to get forgotten that, nationwide, handguns play a vastly larger role in gun crime than do rifles (“assault”-style and otherwise) or shotguns. The DFS data reflect that. Judging by the caliber, at least 1,800 of the 2,192 entries were semi-automatic handguns or revolvers.

3) A surprising number of antique and historical firearms appear on the list.

Before seeing it, if you had asked me how many bolt-action infantry rifles from World War I and before would be on the list of guns seized by police in D.C., I’d probably have said zero. But I’d have been wrong. The list included several antique rifles, including a handful of bolt-action rifles that would have been military standard issue around 1895 or so. How these guns ended up in the custody of the Metropolitan Police Department is anyone’s guess. (Maybe someone’s unregistered antique firearms collection was discovered?) As a history enthusiast, I cringe at the thought of these rifles, which wouldn’t be out of place in a museum, being destroyed.

4) Some of these guns weren’t guns at all.

I noticed that several entries in the list I received gave “.177,” “.68,” or “6mm” as the caliber of the gun in question. These aren’t common bullet calibers, so I looked up the makes and models. As it turned out, the “6mm” entries were all airsoft guns, a realistic toy weapon which shoots a 6mm plastic sphere at velocities too low to break the skin. The .177s were BB and pellet guns, something I should have been able to guess from the fact that the manufacturer was listed as “Daisy.” And the .68s? I thought initially that these might be some sort of muzzle-loading hunting rifles, but nope. Google provided the answer: paintball guns.

How exactly it came to be that 15 airsoft guns, 46 BB guns, and 4 paintball guns were sent to D.C.’s crime lab for forensic analysis, I don’t know. It’s certainly possible they were being carried as decoy guns (which is still illegal in D.C.), but I somehow doubt they’d provide much in the way of useful ballistics. Oh, well.