the tariffs will encourage local production and investment, and already have, but it will take time for that sort of thing to affect consumers
I'm like several pages behind because the highlights stopped auto-updating for now. What I
will say is that the local production and investment angle
is not the angle that Republicans should be framing the tariff discussion. Yes, that is
one of the angles tariffs are demonstrably beneficial, but Trump's leaving so much on the table by seemingly
ignoring the wealth transfer aspect of tariffs. US Customs is
rolling in cash, we're talking triple digit
billions of dollars as of November 2025 when they were collecting high single, low double digit billions every quarter for the last 30-40 years. Tariffs are a form of revenue collection
from commercial pockets that are collected at the time the cargo enters the USA via the relevant port of entry during the Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm business cycle.
Actual "proper" taxation where you rely on the IRS to make rich people and big businesses pay their fair share is a third rail that countless politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, have
died on. The USA got its foundation explicitly due to "no taxation without representation." Taxes, as far back as the 18th century before the USA ever declared independence in the first place, remain a deeply contentious issue that the best and brightest political stars will unanimously end up dying on. The IRS also collects tax revenue
after the end of the Fiscal Year, deadline being April 15th. This is
ample time to cook your books both during the fiscal year and after. The only people paying more are the Joe Schmoes and other such ordinary jackoffs who don't know the correct ways to be rich and avoid paying taxes
or simply don't have enough going on in their lives to take advantage of such loopholes.
Capital flight is the anathema of the IRS, but capital flight don't mean jack shit when you're a multi-billion dollar company operating in the USA and you need to pay the same tariff rates for cargo coming out of the EU, Southeast Asia, China, or whatever that the average small-to-medium sized business has to pay. Furthermore, not all tariffs translate 1:1 with consumer prices. Yes, imported foodstuffs, drinks, medicines, and other such materials that the home consumer can access
will go up much faster to the average jack-off. You know what the average consumer doesn't pay out the ass for? Industrial machinery like valves, gears, rotors, actuators, and so on, industrial petrochemical, injection moulded plastics, used semiconductor wafers, vaccine samples, cold chain stuff meant for biomedical/life science companies like Merck/Millipore, etc. Y'know... the types of industrial/commercial cargo that your average jack-off won't ever see impacting their grocery bills, their pharmacy bills, or anything like that.
The USA is also the world's
largest consumer market, where no singular nation-state or economic bloc can ever hope to usurp. Europoors, Aussies, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Africans, Arabs, all other non-American groups? They
make fun of America's unhinged consumerism, and rightly so. Yet that smug satisfaction in the American's desire to consume product even if it's against their own interests
also means that no other remotely developed or emerging region of the world has the capacity, infrastructure, or scale to match the USA's consumption patterns. We could literally just have a flat 10% tariff on all imports, nothing else, and Trump could tell the rest of the world "you people need a destination for imports, you make fun of Americans for consuming, but you guys took the industry we left behind. Either pay up to do business here, or good luck trying to find another market for your crap."
Yet even now, the whole conversation around tariffs revolves around deprecated globalisation talking points about regression, how free trade is the best trade, how America needs to uphold the rules based international order that only America is seemingly beholden to and not China who actively leverages inequities that give it a disproportionate advantage, and pipe dreams about factories and refineries that won't see operation until Trump exits office and whoever wins 2028 will benefit from. It's maddening, really.
