They Lied About Tariffs

And Pretty Much Everything Else

Biden pumped over half-a-trillion dollars into SNAP in just four years, that is a half-a-trillion additional dollars, above and beyond normal spending, and food prices went through the roof. Huh. Hundreds of thousands new SNAP beneficiaries gained “free food” overnight, creating a new overwhelming demand, and as food production remained static, prices rose quickly, and alarmingly high.

Now I only got to Econ 102 in college, which is where they lost me with “quants” and obscure terminology, but I’m pretty sure the first and most basic lesson taught back in Econ 101 was about “supply and demand”. And that a dramatic increase in demand absent an equal increase in supply is going to have just that effect of higher prices.

Odd how in all the Biden years, and now into the second year of Trump, not one news show, not one investigative reporter has tied the two together. The tremendous increase in SNAP funding, and runaway prices.

We are heading well into year two of the new Trump Presidency, and one of his first acts was to install tariffs.

And when he did, when Trump made tariffs one of his signature opening moves, not just using them to encourage manufacturing growth here, within our borders, but to punish other nations for taking advantage of us all through trade, the “professional class”, the “elites”, and all the learned men of economics let out a shrill scream that was heard across the land and dominated the airwaves for weeks on end.

Elites at all the the best universities, the Ivy Leagues, schooled in the science of economics, said that Trump was a fool, an idiot, a moron, and worse, that he was playing with the complete destruction of our economy, that he had no idea what he was doing, that his actions would be inflationary in an already inflationary time. That Trump was playing with the very collapse of our economy, and costing the American people billions of dollars.

The Oligarchy loves themselves some free trade. Since free trade accelerated from about 1970 onward we’ve seen the greatest transfer of wealth in human history from the middle and lower class to the rich here in America.

The system of free trade we’ve been under has been very, very good to the Oligarchy. Child labor in China has lined the pockets of the rich, and the donor class, for well over 50 years.

They make Nike shoes with child labor, but that doesn’t bring down the price now, does it?

Nooooo, it widens margins and makes Phil Knight, Michael Jordan, and stockholders across the nation rich, rich, rich. As poor black kids pay through the nose for a pair of $ 200 Air Jordans. Nike is quite the racket, they squeeze the kids there in China, they squeeze the kids here in the good old US of A.

Wanna know just how fucked in the mind we are here in America?

Michael Jordan has been perhaps the biggest beneficiary of beating down children in one nation, and stealing from children in ours, and yet he is feted as “the greatest man alive”, worshipped and adored by the masses, in particular the very kids he rapes on price for his shoes.

There he is today playing “Grove 23”, the golf course he and a few friends opened up just north of Tequesta, Florida for themselves, living rather “high-on-the-hog” as we used to say, as Uhghurs in China are whipped, beaten, and worked twelve hours and more a day to make Nike Jordan shoes, and kids and families from the ghetto are forced to pay $ 200 dear dollars just to own a pair of his shoes.

Michael is a billionaire. Lives behind a set of gated walls in “The Bears Club” right north of me in Jupiter. The adulation of him so great in America he needs to be gated at home, and gated where he golfs, lest he be swarmed with fans clamoring their love of all things Michael Jordan.

To say that witnessing a man get rich taking advantage of the most less fortunate in two worlds and then being exulted demonstrates a mind sickness beyond reason, well, my observations such as that one is what makes me an exile from humanity.

Because everyone else in the room just adores Michael Jordan. Don’t you know he is “the GOAT”, the original greatest of all time? Didn’t you just love him and Bugs Bunny in that cartoon movie? And, incidentally, ain’t he cool? I mean the smoothest.

Story I’ve heard is, he was a member at The Bear’s Club, but got a bit too comfortable. Driving carts right to the edge of the greens. Betting huge dollars that attracted a crowd around him and his golf buddies. Had eight, twelve golf carts surrounding greens, holding up play. Acting as if he “owned” the club singularly and solely. And so he got a letter. And that upset Michael. So he took his cash, got a few friends, and opened his own course where he can act any way he wants. Quite an adult move.

Being that you all just love, love, love Michael Jordan, and I’ve just written the three or four previous paragraphs, perhaps now you will understand why I’ve always been the “outsider”, never fit in, was always on the sidelines watching the crowd, and never joining “the crowd”.

Everyone in America is praising a man full-throat. I see a bit of an asshole with talent for playing basketball. That is what makes me different, an outsider. Literally everyone other human sees someone they idolize. I see those children making the shoes, I see those families struggling in poverty to come up with ridiculously high prices for a pair of sneakers. We are not the same.

Ah, but I digress, the point of this column was to say that since Trump installed tariffs, America has collected billions of dollars in revenue, all while inflation has been tamed a bit, down last month to a reported 2.7 percent. And of course while prices are still too high, it is evident that prices are coming down. At the pump, in our energy bills, at the grocery store. Prices have definitely abated.

Whaaaa?

Every economist alive said that was impossible. Can’t happen. Goes against “every economic model we’ve run”.

What a load of manure.

The Ivy League has benefitted from the Oligarchy greater, perhaps, than any other institution. How do you think Harvard has an endowment of hundreds of billions of dollars? The “Donor Class” just loves a building at an august institution named for themselves. The Oligarchy under free world trade has showered the Ivy Leagues with cash, and in turn the Ivy League has been sure to ensure that every bit of modeling supports the status quo.

While we, the Middle Class, have been “had”.

Manufacturing overseas does not benefit America. It benefits the corporation and the class here that owns stocks. In America the Lower Class and Middle Class don’t own stocks, they don’t have enough in the bank to survive a two-thousand dollar emergency, they live paycheck to paycheck in this economy.

All modeling has been cooked to say that tariffs will do harm.

In fact, they’ve added billions to our coffers. While doing no harm at all to prices and demand.

Notice that since the first two, or three months of the Trump Presidency, and the installation of these tariffs, we haven’t heard squat from the “experts”?

There is no more drumbeat on the nightly news about how screwed up Trump is, how awful his tariffs will damage the economy.

Another “big lie” exposed. Along with the laundry list of lies told by the mainstream media that have been debunked, and has cratered the media’s credibility.

As for me, I’ve always been an isolationist. I want us to be the manufacturing base of the world. Not China. Trade deficits weaken us a bit at a time. Sure they help strengthen the dollar as the dollar becomes the defacto world currency, but it bleeds us a little at a time. That makes no sense to me.

We, us, Americans, through our voracious appetite for consumerism, we are the engine that drives the world economy. Us. We. The Middle Class, the wealthy here. And in some cases, say “Air Jordans”, even the poor can have an outsized impact on world trade and flow of goods.

And “we” should be manufacturing those goods, and in turn creating better paying jobs.

Look at China, look at their growth since the start of D’etente with Nixon, US cash has built modern marvels in cities, roads, new airports, the purchase of automobiles, a thriving economy all built on American cash.

All that could have stayed in America. In a circular flow of traded “wealth” that benefitted all classes.

The world should have come to us for all their needs and wants. Enriching America even further.

Instead we allowed the “professionals” to shut down our factories, take the good paying jobs, ship them overseas for cheap labor, and admittedly cheaper goods, ruined our Middle Class in America, and created a Donor Class that used all that extra cash to buy our politicians away from us all, own them, run them for their own benefit, and at our expense.

Now the one thing I don’t know, is what Trump has done with this new surplus of cash, almost a trillion dollars in tariff revenues. It appears he just decided to add eight-hundred-billion to the defense budget. And give our eight-hundred-billion dollars produced by tariffs to the same thieves that have ruined our Middle Class to begin with, I tell you, I can’t see where the tariff money is being spent. The deficit continues to rise, now some three trillion a year.

But the point to be made here is that we’ve been lied to for over 50 years. Tariffs are not some destructive mechanism of an economy, they are the savior of the Middle Class.

Tariffs under Trump have worked, and worked wonderfully. Producing real revenues to our government.

Now if we can get a MAGA Conservative into office who will maintain the tariffs, and balance our budget, and begin to pay down the debt, and stop enriching the Oligarchy, and to begin to work for the American People, then we’d begin to see the promise of the Founding Fathers and the “American Dream”.

Tariffs work to protect Americans.

Unless you are a basketball star who can become a billionaire on the backs of starving children in China, and contributing to crime, and death in America as you price your eponymous shoes so high that children here are willing to rob, steal, and kill to get a pair.

But hey, why change things up when working children to death in one far away nation, and having children kill each other for your shoes here in the city streets, when all that cash can get you a private golf course where you never have to wait to tee off ever, and a wave of the hand brings the cart girl running. Where everyone jumps to your command. And no other “members” can chastise you ever for driving your cart to the edge of the green, the apron.

Hey, this next putt is worth ten grand, or about what a dozen of those Uyghurs will make in a lifetime.

“Long live Free Trade” indeed.