TACO Thursday is cancelled
Brace for impact. Everyone else is. The Trump Always Chickens Out taunts must have hit too close to home for America’s newly minted dictator.
Tariffs up to 50% kick in worldwide, sparing few (CNN):
In just six months, President Donald Trump has remade global trade and upended a century of precedent.
Trump on Thursday placed higher tariffs — again — on just about every country in the world. Even as some countries’ tariff rates came in lower than they had feared, practically all goods coming in to the United States face a significantly higher tax than when Trump took office in January.
The new trade regime will put in place the highest tariffs America has imposed since 1933, during the Smoot-Hawley era — a tariff bill that contributed to the deepening of the Great Depression.
CNN’s David Goldman reports, “Despite a milder-than-expected impact so far at home, there’s already some evidence Trump’s tariffs are — slowly — reigniting inflation and slowing the US economy.”
“A less productive economy requires fewer workers,” John Silvia, CEO of Dynamic Economic Strategy, tells the Associated Press. “But there is more, the higher tariff prices lower workers’ real wages. The economy has become less productive, and firms cannot pay the same real wages as before. Actions have consequences.”
Still insistent that foreign countries will pay the tariffs, not American importers and consumers, Donald Trump boasted on Wednesday(Associated Press):
“I think the growth is going to be unprecedented,” Trump said Wednesday. He said the U.S. was “taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs,” but did not provide a specific figure for revenues because “we don’t even know what the final number is” regarding the rates.
More for him, less for you is a good bet.
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