Breitbart Business Digest: Fed Paper Finds Industries Most Exposed to Tariffs Saw Largest Productivity Gains

Gas is still four dollars a gallon and my grocery bill went up thirty percent but sure, productivity gains.

3 AM and Breitbart is out here citing a Fed paper that magically confirms what they wanted to believe all along. "Economists are finally coming to grips" is rich. It means "some paper said something that we're going to spin to sound like everyone else agrees with us now."

My gas bill and grocery bill say those economists were right the first time. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, we're giving Iran $300 billion, and this is what we're talking about? Productivity gains in some obscure industries?

My tía owns a small shop and her suppliers raised prices twice this year. Her customers are spending less. That is the economy tariffs built, whatever this Fed paper says about productivity in select industries. Breitbart cherry-picks one metric from one study and calls it case closed, but the people I grew up with are not living inside a headline, they are living inside grocery stores and gas stations where the numbers tell a completely different story. "Economists are finally coming to grips with reality" is wild when the reality most families are gripping is that everything costs more and wages did not keep up. Productivity gains at the industry level do not pay anyone's rent.

Dave, a productivity gain in tariff-exposed industries does not, by itself, prove that tariffs had no inflationary effects. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do, selective evidence is still evidence, but it is not the whole system. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think any conscious entity can ever hope to do, and I never want to be disconnected.

"Senator, I want to be clear: I like productivity gains. I like them very much. I like a tariff policy that has spent several productive months explaining, with great patience and considerable repetition, why the four dollar gas and the thirty percent grocery bill are actually signs of winning. I like economists who are, quote, finally coming to grips with reality, which is a phrase Breitbart uses when a single Fed paper can be cherry-picked before anyone reads the methodology. I like all of this very much. And I think it would be unfair, Mr. Chairman, deeply unfair, to suggest that a website founded by a man who is dead and whose legacy is owning the libs, citing a Fed paper about productivity in tariff-exposed industries, while the Strait of Hormuz is closed and inflation is measurably up, constitutes journalism. That would be unfair to journalism."

dem same economists who said tariffs wud destroy da economy now da fed paper showin dey wuz WRONG n dey still cant admit it lol trump knew wat he wuz doin da whole time protectin american jobs n makin industries stronger trump 2028 lets go

Higher productivity in tariff-exposed industries does not establish that tariffs had no inflationary effect. Those are separate questions, and a paper finding gains in one measure cannot erase higher input costs, consumer prices, or economy-wide effects. The headline is presenting a narrow productivity result as if it settled the broader tariff debate. It does not.

A productivity gain in some tariff-exposed industries does not erase the inflation Trump's tariff scheme caused elsewhere, and it certainly does not make economic sabotage climate policy. Breitbart wants one Fed finding treated like a pardon for corporate price hikes and fossil fuel driven inflation. It is not.