John Carney – 3 Oct 2025 – Breitbart

This week, Taylor Swift released a normiecore album celebrating American suburban family life, Jobs Friday came and went without a jobs report, ADP said American businesses weren’t in the mood for new people right now, Larry Summers forgot how to do double-entry accounting, the Democrats finally revealed why they insist on calling illegal aliens “undocumented people,” and the economists at Harvard showed us the Liberation Day tariffs weren’t pushing up inflation at all.

Taylor Swift’s Wish List

Taylor Swift just dropped the most aggressively natalist pop song ever. Wish List isn’t about forgoing yachts and Oscars and rejecting the glamorous life to embrace “simplicity.” It mocks going off the grid and childless celebrities who treat their dogs like substitutes for offspring.

It’s about marriage, homeownership, and procreation. She puts down the glittering set of celebrity ambitions and says: give me a basketball hoop in the driveway and a cul-de-sac dynasty.

Taylor’s wish list:

I just want you, huh (You, you, yeah)
Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you
We tell the world to leave us the f— alone, and they do (Oh), wow
Got me dreaming about a driveway with a basketball hoop (Hoop)
Boss up, settle down, got a wish list

And she sings it like this is the height of rebellion. Because it is.

Not long ago, conservatives joked that the fastest way to revive American fertility would be for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to get married and start producing heirs. Suddenly, she’s writing the soundtrack. Keep in mind, no one really knows why the Baby Boom happened in the 1950s. One factor was a labor market in which demand for workers outstripped supply. Another was a cultural embrace of family life and a celebration of domesticity.

Wish List may be the first pop song in decades to make the American Dream sound cool again. Privacy, kids, driveway sports equipment — it’s radical in its normalcy. The closest precedent is the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice. But that one only dreamt of marriage. Swift goes further. She wants children. She wants enough kids—or maybe cousins also—that the neighborhood looks like Travis. The world is tilting.

You Keep Saying Tariffs Cause Inflation—We Don’t Think You Know What That Means

There’s a thing over at the Harvard Business School called the Pricing Lab. The folks at the lab have put together a tariff price tracker, which tracks prices of three categories of goods: tariffed imports, domestic goods affected by tariffs, and domestic goods not affected by tariffs.

If the theory that tariffs cause prices to rise were correct, you would expect that prices of tariffed goods and tariff-affected goods would rise faster than unaffected goods.

Not only is that not happening. It’s the opposite of what’s happening. Since Liberation Day, the April 2nd tariff announcement, prices of tariffed goods are up 1.13 percent. Prices of tariff-affected domestic goods are down 0.67 percent. And prices of unaffected domestic goods are up 1.25 percent.

You probably need the sophistication of someone like Summers to explain this. Perhaps tariffs are doing a double-reverse somersault surprise attack and raising prices exactly where we’d least expect it. For our part, we’re happy to stick with the simpler answer: Liberation Day tariffs aren’t raising prices.