Trump’s Immigration Threats Are Already Wrecking the Food Industry
The past election featured a lot of really dimwitted comments by those who decided to vote for Trump about making the price of food "go down".
Dimwitted.
The government has very little ability to make the price of anything whatsoever go down. There are a few options. For one, if an item is imported and taxed at the border, you can remove the tax.
That's the exact opposite of what the Genius with Really Good Genes proposes to do. That's going to raise prices.
Another is to impact the price of something the government actually controls, such as privatizing an industry or releasing a supply of something held by the government.
Neither of those are options right now.
Trump's really good brain has so far simply proposed to the Saudis that the produce a lot of oil. The Saudis are likely laughing.
If they did, that would drop the price of oil, which drops the price of everything else. It also makes US oil completely unviable economically as its very expensive to drill for. We already know this as a few years ago there was a glut of oil, which dropped its price and stopped US drilling dead in its tracks.
One of the things Trump promised his followers that he would do, which he can do to some limited extent, is deport aliens. Hopefully they're illegal aliens, but to a lot of his supporters, any alien will do, as long as the alien has brown skin.
Donald Musk and Ted Cruz, born respectively in South Africa and Canada, can stay, which is a real shame. I'd be okay with deporting both of them.
US agriculture depends heavily on illegal aliens from Mexico. It has for decades. It's a situation which never should have been allowed to develop, but it was because both Republicans and Democrats turned a blind eye to it. Now, the US is dependent on that migrant population.
Trump promises to deport all these people as quickly as possible. That means administering a massive shock to the farm economy, which means the prices of everything at the grocery store will go up, up, up. Trump will ignore that. Consumers won't be able to, and those who knew that this would occur ought to be plastering these on self check out lines:
It won't end there of course. The economic genius has fallen in love with tariffs, something that fell out of favor as they helped create the Great Depression, bring Hitler into power, and cause World War Two.
Trump really doesn't seem to be the smartest bulb in the bunch and apparently he skipped lessons in history. Part of the reason he cited for wanting to change the name of Denali to Mt. McKinley is that McKinley, who was President before income tax was legal, used tariffs to fund the rather small U.S. budget of the time.
What a boofador.
Trump tends to think like, and talk, like a gangster. As we discuss in an upcoming post, he may have in fact learned a lot of his "art of the deal" by having to deal with the mafia on New York construction projects. The mafia operates, in fact, a lot like Trump. They make big threats, and then hurt people, until a rival gang knuckles under or regular people give in.
The problem here, of course, is that countries aren't criminal gangs, usually (Russia sort of is), and they don't behave that way. Democratic nations particularly don't. Trump is getting the middle finger from Canada and Mexico right now, but the besotted American public hasn't noticed. If Trump imposes the tariffs he threatens to, Canada is threatening to flat out cease exporting into the US. What Canada has in spades, oil and lumber, it can sell elsewhere. We can't replace what we get from them.
That'll spike the price of oil massively. We can't offset the oil deficit that would result in as we're already, in spite of the moronic "drill baby drill" comments people make, drilling at capacity. That would easily add 1/3d to the price at the pumps, if not 3 times to it.
And the removal of lumber would simply end the construction industry.
Canada is also a major exporter of hydroelectric power into the US. If Canada starts taxing that, and it can, at a rate to offset tariffs, living in New England will be extremely expensive.
As for Mexico, go to the grocery store and see how many things are "grown in Mexico". With California in trouble due to Trump's immigration policies, and a retaliating Mexico you'll get to eat what can be produced locally.
Um, yum. Canned corn will still be there.
It'd be tempting to say "people will get what they deserve, but Trump didn't even take 50% of the popular vote.
Let's say that again. He didn't take even 50% of the popular vote.
He took 49.8%, which is regarded as impressive in American politics, but in reality is not. 50.2 % of the American public voted against him.
Third parties may have put Trump in office.
In some systems, if a person doesn't take over 50% of the vote, there's a runoff election between the top two vote getters until somebody does. If that had been done, would Trump be President?
Anyhow, with about 50% voting for him, and 50% voting against him, Trump doesn't have a mandate to do squat. Quite a few of his insiders know that which is why they're rushing to put in their projects while they can, which is really only until the next mid term election when an enraged public turns on the GOP. It's going to happen.
In the meantime, the 50% of the country that didn't vote for Trump is going to endure rising prices, destroyed retirement accounts, a Federal government that won't help with local disasters, and the increasing slide of the country into a mean, childish, brutish, thugocracy.
