Disclaimer: I am not nor have I ever been, an egghead macro or micro economist or a tenured member of a high falutin academy. Shocking, as it may seem. While I may opine on various topics, I don’t speak with a condescending aristocratic tone and I don’t wear a paisley printed ascot with a velvet dinner jacket. I’ve never been to a soiree and I don’t have a monthly subscription to the New York Times, The Atlantic or Esquire. I’m a regular dude. A Joe, if you will. I work a 9 to 5. I worry about my kid’s future. I worry about the bills and like many, I’m sick of taking it on the chin as the “little” guy routinely has for the past 50 years at least.
Where am I going with this you ask? Well, I was watching the news and heard that Amazon will be displaying the tariff cost as well as the price of the item you search for, and it got me thinking, which I admit can sometimes be a bad thing, what ever shall we do?!
So what exactly is going on with all this tariff talk for starters? What’s a tariff? Why should we care? Is it a good or bad thing? Will the Mets maintain this level of dominance all season? All weighty questions, I know. Am I qualified to even talk about this? Ya damn skippy I am!
I say that because I took in a Joe Rogan podcast recently where he had Dave Smith go tet-a-tet with Douglas Murray. I’m not going to deep dive into that as you can watch it for yourself, but essentially Douglas Murray is a British commentator/critic, dare I say, an intellectual. Just ask him, he’ll tell ya. Dave Smith is a comedian, podcaster and an avowed Libertarian and someone I would consider, a regular dude.
The Rogan podcast touched on many topics from the war with Israel and Hamas, to the war in Ukraine and to the past election in the US. All the while, the ever so smug Murray quite literally asks Smith, where he gets off having an opinion since he’s not an “expert” in anything. It was a true expose in elitism and quite hilarious but it really showed the world we live in today and why so many of the legacy media types are crumbling in front of our eyes because of their boundless and very self aware arrogance.
Tariffs used to be the way this country made money to operate the Federal government. It was also used as a way to protect our industries from foreign competition which used very cheap labor to create goods to be sold to Americans. Sound familiar? As time went on, transportation became more advanced and products from around the world would come into the US from nations but levied with huge tariffs, making them less desirable. By 1913 the US transitioned to the Income Tax, and we no longer had to rely on Tariffs to bring in money to run the government. Tariffs became more of a tool in trade negotiations and not a necessity to keep the business of government running.
The concept of tariffs is simple as is the concept of “free trade”. But what is free trade? Well essentially, it’s zero tariffs by BOTH parties in a trade agreement. Take Britain for example. We would charge them zero in tariffs if they reciprocated. Has it ever happened? Nope. Right now Britain charges the US a 10% tariff which the Trump administration said they will reciprocate. Why is it that in Europe you can buy a Mercedes or a BMW but not a Ford or Chevy? You can certainly buy a Mercedes or a Beemer in the US. Why the double standard? Because many European countries (our allies by the way) have set it up that way and we in the US have just gone along with it like good little lemmings, for a very-long-time.
I’m old enough to remember NAFTA, it was the North American “Free” Trade Agreement that was born in old man Bush’s presidency but was implemented in the Clinton presidency. It was supposed to make trade free between the US, Canada, and Mexico. How did that turn out for us? Again, I’m old enough to remember the 1992 Presidential election and Ross Perot.
He ran as a third party candidate against old man Bush and Clinton. He foretold how NAFTA would end up for the US with his famous line, “that giant sucking sound” of US jobs going overseas. Factories fled to Mexico for cheap labor and lax environmental protections. This was all before the joys of Amazon, Temu and Shein, with their inferior made cheap products from China flooding the US market, acting like heroin to the US consumer. All of this, predicted by a silly looking and sounding Texas businessman, that both political parties in America didn’t take seriously and started to lampoon personally and eventually hate. Perot was definitely before his time and maybe not the best marketer for those ideas, wink wink.
So here we are, at a major crossroad as to how we do business with other nations. If a nation like India, wants to charge the US a 52% tariff, why would we NOT reciprocate at the very least? What do we owe India and its workforce to allow them to do that to us? What do we get out of this arrangement, besides jobs that were here in the US, shipped over there for obvious reasons. Have you tried to speak to customer service for ANY major company you do business with? It’s a simple matter of fairness really. And to those who are hell bent at opposing it, ironically and historically, many of them used to be on the side of fairness, the “little” guy and the use of tariffs. Over time, now they’ve become the power elite, having tasted the succulent fruit of greed, enjoying the lavishes that come with it. My old man used to say, money will make good Democrats and Republicans sell their own mother’s to stay in power and keep the gravy train going.
It’s time we put on our big boy and big girl pants and do what's right for the American worker for a change and not feed the machine and the parasites that run it. We’ve been taken advantage of because we’ve allowed it. It’s time to body check these nations and our political and business leaders, ala Claude Lemeiux, for better or worse, before it’s too late.
***UPDATE***
Amazon decided NOT to play games their Beijing masters wanted by displaying the tariff alongside the price of an item. You see, body checks do work.
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