Tag: tariffs

That Crazy Trump

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I was trying to imagine what will be the result if China is hit with a 50% tariff.  Now China is not Vietnam.  China’s labor is no longer strictly speaking third world.  It’s probably “second world.”  Will a two dollar “hammer” still sell if it costs three dollars?  It’s a fair question.  How about a fifty-dollar tool that now costs seventy-five dollars.  Well, maybe you say, “Sure because the American tool costs one hundred dollars.”  But what if I remind you that it’s a really awful tool that doesn’t work very well and only lasts a third of the life; like those things you buy at Harbor Freight.  Well, now you have something to think about.

Maybe that’s what Trump is doing.  The only thing I can’t figure out is if the correct number is 50% or 100% or 300%.  I really don’t have a good feel for what the equivalence point is.  And it can’t be the same for every different item out there.  How exactly does he make this work.

The funny thing is I’m excited about the prospect of closing the “China valve.”  I’d love to see nothing exported from China to America.  I witnessed first-hand American companies building the industrial capacity in China needed to replace American jobs by the million.  They gladly partnered with the Chinese government and they got their thirty pieces of silver in the process only it was probably ten pieces of silver.  The Chinese were always cheap.

I listened to Pete Navarro talk about how tariffs are just a small part of the trade picture.  Europe and other places have a value added tax (VAT) that they use to keep out imports.  And places like Vietnam (and China) infamously steal intellectual property without any concern for consequences.  They bootleg everything from clothing to toys to handbags to you name it.  And nothing is done.  From what I can tell we’re not trying to fix these things.  We’re trying to quarantine the merchandise coming from this whole side of the world.  Wow.

So, I’m all for this.

But can it be done?

I’m assuming there will be an enormous disruption to commerce.  After all, these products are shipped across the Pacific on boats that take weeks to reach here.  Now all of this product costs a lot more.  What if the people who bought it to sell it to Americans can’t get people to buy it at the higher prices?  What happens at Christmas when I can’t buy all that crappy branded merchandise associated with the latest crappy Hollywood kid movie?  Mass hysteria!

And what about all those American companies that buy parts for their products from China and the rest of Asia?  Will this change their pricing?  Yes.  But now they’ll also be competing against foreign manufacturers whose products will really get expensive.  German and Japanese cars are excellent.  But will they be worth a significantly higher price tag?  That will have to be decided on the merits.  And will that mean that Toyota and Mercedes will start making more of their cars here?  I hope so.  That is where we get a win/win.

Well, the stock market seemed to steady today.  I’m following all of this and it’s wild stuff.  That crazy Trump.  He’s the greatest show on Earth.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 06APR2025 – Trade, Tariffs and Time

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Whatever the agenda is it must be cast before January 27. If it delays, it dies. After the next swearing in of Congress any progress not completed will probably be smothered in it’s afterbirth.
The usual suspects are screaming for blood, and don’t understand the way tariffs should work.
If you penalize products coming from my country to yours, I should do the same to your goods in order to keep a balance of trade. We are bit by tariffs, excise taxes, and down right bans on our exports, but are expected to forget that on their exports. Some actually make sense, like the ban on beef since we turn cattle into unwilling cannibals by reprocessing animal offal into cattle feed, some are just a protectionism by the other countries.
We need to either play reciprocally or refuse to play at all. Rumour has it mothballed cardboard plants in Maine are being looked into as a consequence of the tariffs with Canada.
European social practices have been indirectly supported by our bearing their defense burdens freeing up their Treasury for bribing the masses with healthcare, work breaks, and other bennies. Let them sort their own issues in their home since we are only uncultured upstarts according to them.
Asian economies get the same bribery, Japan was able to direct the monies that would have been used for defense into industries post WWII, and allowed them to specialize in electronics, Korea directly benefits by having our tripwire troops in place permitting them to focus on commerce instead of having to secure their borders. Post Kim rule in NK might collapse and actually allow for reunification of the two societies, but not under the one family rule it has had for 75 years.
If we did what the world is asking and tended to our own interest and business, because power hates a vacuum some entity would club to the top of the dung heap and declare themselves king of the pile.
It would be interesting to see as a thought experiment whether it would be an eastern invasion into the power vacuum, or another global jihad. Time may tell.

Donald Trump’s Tariff Typhoon Hits Wall Street.  Mayhem Ensues

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That Donald Trump, he’s got folks more stirred up than a hornet’s nest.  I read that the Dow was off by 8% on the week.  Now that’s a lot.  I think back on Black Monday in the ‘80s it ended down about that amount.  And that riled up folks too.  Of course, I’m guessing most of these angry investors aren’t going to sell off their holdings.  For them equity is the only game in town.  Shorting the market could get some of them hurt.

I’ve got to say, Trump isn’t doing things by halves.  And I think he’s going in the right direction.  Things won’t change until all of the globalist policies are upended.  And upending those policies will produce havoc in the short term.  And that’s what we’re seeing.  One thing’s for sure I wouldn’t be thinking about buying any high end imported cars or other luxury items.  They’re gonna get expensive.  And there’s gonna be a lot of angry folks who sell those things who will be making a lot less money until things re-sort themselves around changes in the tariff situation.

Well, it should be interesting to see if Trump can get this done.  There’s nothing certain about his hold on power.  The Republicans in Congress are as disloyal a bunch as any imaginable and if they think Trump is in trouble they’ll turn on him in a heartbeat.  And I’m sure he knows that.  For myself personally, I’m enjoying all the drama unfolding on the social platforms.  The folks on X have been spinning around like lunatics declaring the end of the world.  And that can be very entertaining.  I got into a number of spirited discussions with folks who told me we’re living in the best of all possible worlds and wanting Americans to have manufacturing jobs was stupid, nostalgic, racist (of course) and just plain evil.  And that really was fun.  One guy told me that the present world is so much better than the old bad world of the 1950s because now people live twelve years longer.  I was trying to understand how putting tariffs on foreign goods would reduce my life expectancy by twelve years.  When I questioned whether quality of life was as important as quantity he said, “You answer my question first and then we will deal with your non sequitur.”  Well, I noted his use of the royal plural and he stomped off.  So, there is definitely an entertainment component to Donald Trump’s trade policy.

I’ve read that a number of countries are now negotiating for a deal and I assume that’s what Trump intends.  He wants these advanced countries to reduce their tariffs against American products.  But countries with very low labor costs like China and Vietnam I suspect they’ll get stuck with tariffs levied against their goods.  And what that will do is force American manufacturers to on-shore some of their operations to prevent the loss of American business.  That’s what supposedly Apple intends to do.  What I don’t know is how quickly something like that can be done.  Factories don’t spring up like vegetables.  It takes years to build infrastructure so I don’t know how much on-shoring can be done in 2025.

We will see how it plays out.  Anyway, I’m rooting for him.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 04APR2025 – Is Americans

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What makes America great is Americans, not some global economic think tank idea about “Cosmopolitanism.”

We’re not a group of backwoods rubes crouching in fear of the outside world. What we are, and should always be, are people who care more about the well-being of each other and not the stock portfolio of a multinational corporation that will pull the rug at the first chance of increasing profit shares. This nation’s initials are USA not GDP. The overly misused phrase of collectivism when describing Marxist-style ideologies has woefully made it a dirty word for those of us on the Right-wing to employ. It needs to be reclaimed and utilized often. It is the proper attitude to have for our fellow Americans’ living conditions. We are all in the same boat, whether some are in first-class cabins or third-class.

Are protectionist tariff policies the silver bullet solution that will restore American labor and wage loss woes? Will the Rust Belt be revitalized with a glut of new manufacturing jobs by next year? Of course not. But it’s a start. Prepare for pain and embrace the understanding that it is needed and long overdue. The medicine that cures does not always go down easily. To go down fighting is better than to simply accept the current state of affairs.

Legacy media reporting tries to lead one to believe that tariffs will be the only strategy Trump will use. That is folly and only propaganda for the low-information citizen as they like to call most of us. Stronger tariffs are only one piece of the equation that (might) correct the dismal path we are on.

Things are very wrong with how the game is set up. Many of us know this. The promised results of NAFTA, free trade (Ha!) and WTO platitudes were a siren song that mainly enriched a select few. Brave voices spoke out on this such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. They were right.

It is time for something different and if it takes burning my 401K to the ground so that my kids do not have to be serfs to the worship of an almighty GDP Excel spreadsheet God of Globohomo, then I say burn it to the ground.

Now That’s Showmanship

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Ah, Groundhog Day.  When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up.  After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate.  The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit.  This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement.  Almost any depth of snow can be removed.  0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel.  2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow.  After that it get trickier, but it can still be done.  And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.

A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster.  If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it.  Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway.  That’s very unfortunate.  Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface.  This works but it is extremely labor intensive.  So, I hate rain in the winter.  And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.

Alright, enough whining.

So, what’s new?  Well, tariffs.  Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places.  And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed.  Wow.  Trump is going full steam ahead.  Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do?  Nothing.”  But then he does three more things.  One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s.  These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country.  Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens.  Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem.  I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better.  Sort of an anti-Obama.

Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week.  If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote.  And that’s actually me being optimistic.  There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate.  McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train.  I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI.  Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby.  This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.

Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data

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top-medical-indust-receip

 

 

As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie.  So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic.  Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.

We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say).  I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow.  This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end.  But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth).  I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens.  Now that’s showmanship.