On the menu today: The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security is contemplating extending Section 232 duties on “brass-wind musical instruments and their parts and accessories.” We’ve always known Washington has been in the pocket of . . . Big Saxophone.
The other day the Washington Post asked me to contribute to a symposium on what strategy Republicans should use in the final month or so before the midterm elections. It’s too late to change much now, of course. Early voting is underway in five states; more than 220,000 Virginians have already cast ballots, about 22 percent of the total early votes cast in 2022. And we’re not even in October yet.
A better, more effective move for Republicans would have been to have an affordability agenda ready to go, tout, and enact within the last six months or so.
A Real Affordability Agenda: Coffee, Copper, and Refineries
Imagine a Republican candidate for office who said, “A lot of products on store shelves in this country are more expensive than they were two years ago, because we chose to make them more expensive by imposing new tariffs or raising existing tariffs on imported goods. . . . When I am elected to Congress, we will, via force of legislation, repeal all tariffs that have been unilaterally imposed by the administration.”
Or at least as many as possible. You want to keep the tariffs in place on China because they’re an obvious geopolitical foe? Fine, go right ahead. But Americans have been buying products from Canada and Mexico and the European Union and our Asian allies for years.
Enacting all these tariffs was supposed to trigger a manufacturing renaissance. Back in December, Trump pledged, “You’re going to see results in six months to a year. I think you’ll see results. We’ve never had anything like it.”
The month before “Liberation Day” in April 2025, America had 12,666,000 manufacturing jobs. In August, we had 12,638,000 manufacturing jobs.
The administration even enacted tariffs on products where there wasn’t much of a U.S. industry to protect.
Most years, Brazil is the largest exporter of coffee to the U.S., Colombia is a close second, and Vietnam and Indonesia are in the top ten. On “Liberation Day” in April 2025, the administration unilaterally enacted a new 50 percent tariff on coffee from Brazil, alongside tariffs of 25 percent on coffee from India, 20 percent on coffee from Vietnam, and 19 percent on coffee from Indonesia.
There isn’t much of a U.S. coffee growing industry to protect from foreign competition. Plantations in Hawaii produce about 4 million pounds per year. That’s million with an “m.” Americans consume 3.6 billion pounds per year. That’s billion with a “b.” In other words, the amount of coffee we produce domestically in a year could meet about half a morning’s worth of demand.
That tariff never made sense; all it did was make your morning cup of coffee more expensive. By November 2025, the administration belatedly realized the effects and rescinded the tariffs on coffee, but by then every point in the coffee supply chain had hiked their prices to cover the costs of the tariffs; “importers typically lock in prices months in advance.” In February 2025, the average price per pound of ground roast coffee was $7.24; as of August, it is $9.29. In December 2019, it was $4.05. (All figures are from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis.)
Just about anything electric uses copper; it is the third-most-used metal in the United States.
The U.S. mines a decent amount of copper within its borders, but still requires imports:
The U.S. produces 850,000 tons of refined copper from its own mines, plus an additional 870,000 tons in copper scrap from recycling (both post-consumer scrap and new scrap recovered from fabricating operations), but to meet the country’s needs of about 2.5 million tons, it imports an additional 810,000 tons of refined copper. That leaves a 30 percent gap. While these figures represent U.S. copper consumption, copper demand is likely even higher because the U.S. also imports manufactured goods containing copper that aren’t counted in consumption figures.
And demand is increasing rapidly:
The demand for copper is expected to increase rapidly from grid modernization, more electric vehicles, increased renewable energy sources needed to power everyday lives, and from the increase in artificial intelligence which is spurring the rise of high energy consuming data centers.
To support grid modernization and renewables integration, the U.S. will likely need to build an estimated 5,000 miles of new transmission line annually in the coming decades. That figure, based on an analysis from the Department of Energy’s 2024 National Transmission Planning Study, would require hundreds of thousands of additional tons of copper per year, further pressuring the supply base.
Sales of electric vehicles in the U.S. are down from their peak of 163,000 in December 2024, but they were at 106,000 in August.
It’s fine to want more U.S. production of copper, but the U.S. is not going to find ways to mine and smelt or recycle 810,000 tons a year overnight.
On August 1, 2025, President Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on semi-finished copper and copper derivatives, and on April 6 of this year, he adjusted it to a 50 percent tariff on the full value of semi-finished copper products and 25 percent on the full value of copper-intensive derivative products. (Semi-finished copper products are pipes and tubes, wires and rods, sheets and plates, etc.)
Now, remember, the U.S. did not have a big pile of extra, unused, domestically produced copper lying around. And there was no discernible surge in U.S. copper mining in the year after the enactment of the tariffs, nor was there a discernible surge in U.S. smelting and refining of copper. You can’t just snap your fingers and double U.S. domestic copper production.
U.S manufacturers that use copper and copper products had no choice but to pay the tariffs. There was no alternate domestic supply. And while this country could take steps to increase domestic production, the new supply is years away.
About a week ago, Ivanhoe Electric announced it was receiving $1.1 billion in debt financing from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to develop its Santa Cruz copper project in Arizona. “The company plans to start driving the decline in mid-2027 and reach the copper reserve about a year later. Ivanhoe hopes to place the first ore on its leach pads in the second half of 2028 and produce its first cathode in the first half of 2029.”
There are some proposed new mines on the drawing board; in August, the state of Michigan awarded $50 million in state grants for land and road improvements at the proposed Copperwood Mine in the western Upper Peninsula. That mine is scheduled to begin production “in 2029 or 2030.”
The Resolution Copper project is a proposed underground copper mine in the Copper Triangle, approximately 60 miles east of Phoenix. They’re hoping to have it up and running “by the mid-2030s.”
These might well be worthwhile projects, but none of them are expected to start producing copper until the very end of Trump’s term at the earliest. And until they’re up and running, U.S. manufacturers will need to use imported copper — and they’ll be forced to pay more, because of the tariffs. And despite the insistence of our president that tariffs “cost Americans nothing,” those companies will pass along the higher costs to consumers.
By the way, Chile is the top source of U.S. copper imports (46 percent), followed by Canada (18 percent), Congo (10 percent), Mexico (5 percent), and Peru (5 percent). Do you see a lot of geopolitical enemies on that list? Do you lay awake at night, thinking of the perfidious Chileans and their copper mines, taking away American copper mining jobs?
The Tax Policy Center estimated that tariffs announced by the Trump administration will impose an average burden of about $920 per tax unit (or household) in 2026. Repeal that, and you’re putting, on average, $920 back into the pockets of each U.S. household. (In 2025, the tariffs increased taxes by an average of $1,000 per U.S. household, before some were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.)
Imagine if we dumped all the tariffs, other than the ones on China (and maybe the ones on the minuscule amount of goods and services we import from Russia, Iran, and North Korea)
Manufacturers, builders, and automakers that rely on imported steel, aluminum, lumber, and components would get cheaper inputs.
We currently tax imported steel at 50 percent, although there is a complicated list of exceptions. Imagine when U.S. construction companies and their projects can suddenly buy girders at significantly cheaper prices. Imagine U.S. manufacturing companies building their assembly lines out of less expensive steel, or U.S. automotive companies not having to pay as much for their steel. (This is separate from the administration’s 25 percent tariff on automotive parts, a separate 10 percent or 12.5 percent tariff on a country not meeting forced labor enforcement standards, and particular tariffs on countries or the European Union.)
Imagine if there were no 100 percent tariff on imported pharmaceutical products. Nor a 25 percent tariff on advanced semiconductor chips.
Imagine U.S. home builders no longer paying 10 percent tariff on softwood timber and lumber, or 25 percent on kitchen cabinets, vanities, and upholstered wooden furniture.
Finally, we have learned the hard way that being the world leader in crude oil production — by a lot! — cannot guarantee reasonable prices for U.S. consumers because we don’t have enough refinery capacity to turn it into unleaded gasoline and diesel fuel. As of June, our refineries are operating at 96.5 percent of capacity; in any given month, some small percentage of oil refineries must be taken offline for maintenance and repairs.
Earlier this year, the administration touted the announcement that “America First Refining will build a 168,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Brownsville, Texas, a deep-water port with direct rail and sea access, supported by investment from India’s Reliance Industries.” This is the first new major U.S. refinery project in roughly 50 years, which is excellent news. The bad news is that it is “expected to be fully operational by 2029.”
Earlier this month, North Dakota Republican Senator Kevin Cramer wrote, “In Belfield, N.D., the Davis Refinery is fully permitted and working towards additional financing. Once completed, it will be able to refine nearly 50,000 barrels per day of light sweet American crude for customers across the Midwest.” The Davis Refinery is “due for completion in early 2029.”
Americans get bothered by high gas prices, but apparently never quite bothered enough to say, “Okay, let’s build at least one additional refinery in each state, so that every state has a readily accessible supply of refined gasoline.”
We can increase American production of oil, copper, and steel. In fact, the rapid proliferation of new rare-earth mines and plants is forcing discussions of how to develop a sufficient rare-earth mining and refining workforce:
USA Rare Earth broke ground on September 9 on a $1.2 billion magnet plant in Blacksburg, South Carolina, with 6,400 tonnes a year of sintered NdFeB capacity, about 490 jobs and commissioning from 2028. The workforce line in the announcement was $250,000 for Spartanburg Community College’s new SPARK Center, roughly 0.02% of the capital cost, at a company that has lined up $1.6 billion in federal support. MP Materials says its $1.25 billion magnet campus in Texas, pitched at more than 1,500 jobs, is now “officially vertical.”
Energy Fuels began building its $104 million White Mesa heavy rare earth expansion in Utah on July 29, with terbium and dysprosium circuits due by the end of 2027, while its $1.9 billion purchase of German magnet maker VAC, which employs more than 1,000 people in Hanau, still awaits approval from Berlin. Buying a trained magnet workforce is one way to get one. Vulcan Elements this week won a US Army contract to supply magnets for drones, its tenth with the Department of War, from a North Carolina plant with 10,000 tonnes a year of planned capacity and about 1,000 jobs. Cyclic Materials opened a 25,000 tonne a year recycling plant in Mesa, Arizona, 17 months after announcing it, employing “dozens” of skilled workers.
But all these mines, smelters, industrial centers, production lines, and supply chains take years to build and set up. It’s asking a lot of American consumers and producers to pay high tariffs in the meantime.
ADDENDUM: As the NR editors note, there are some encouraging signs in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil flows through the strait were averaging nearly 13 million barrels a day, and even surpassed 20 million barrels one day last week. Before the war, the average was about 20 million barrels per day. (With that in mind, this morning, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations reported “a tanker has been struck by an unknown projectile.”)
Hey, remember the memorandum of understanding? Thank goodness that horrendous deal didn’t become reality.