The Tariff-ick Lies Being Told

One of the things that sent me on this tirade was receiving a “LinkedIn News” email with four anti-tariff propaganda stories – all incredibly misleading.

Isn’t it funny how no one ever really spoke about tariffs prior to Trump? Personally, I’ve believed they were a serious problem for most of my life. Still, due to the lack of public conversations, most people have been oblivious to tariffs and their impact on the American economy.

If you suffer from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), then it won’t matter what I say here, and you probably would never read this anyway, but if you’re still on the fence or simply don’t understand things, then please continue to read…

Have you ever looked at items you’ve purchased with any curiosity and perhaps asked:

“How does anyone make this widget, ship it around the world, and sell it for such a cheap price?”

Products don’t just get manufactured in Asia. There’s just a bit of logistics involved as well to get that product to your local store. As a product leaves the manufacturing floor, it has to be packaged.  Then, all those packages get packed in larger boxes, and all those larger boxes get packed onto pallets and wrapped.  All of those pallets get loaded onto trucks, then they are transported to docks, where they are unloaded and packed onto ships. Those ships are navigated up to halfway around the world to be unloaded, placed back on trucks, and transported to warehouses to be staged. Many different products are managed and broken down to be repackaged as inventory pallets, loaded back onto trucks, and transported to individual stores, where merchandise is unpacked and stocked onto shelves. Once you’ve picked up the item, a person (or a self-check system) must accept payment.

All this happens, and you only pay $1 for a package containing a dozen cheap shaving razors at your local Dollar General. DG is still making a significant margin of profit!

The story is the same whether the widget is a pack of razors or anything else made somewhere in Asia.

Tariffs are just one reason this is allowed to happen.  You could call it corporate greed; to take all the manufacturing out of this country and place it in another so you can sell there and export back to America, but that’s not the root of the problem, the end-consumer is.

Too many people in America do not care where or how their products arrive; they only care to pay the cheapest price. What are corporations to do? Are they supposed to remain in America and be priced out of business?

Let’s forget about the tariffs for just a moment, because that’s just one piece of a larger economic puzzle. Let’s pose a couple of moral questions first…

Do you support slavery? If you buy cheap goods from China or other places in Asia, there’s a good chance you’ve been financially supporting it. Combine that with the exploitation of child labor. Are you good with that?

It is often a trivial amount for the factory workers who do get paid. Can you imagine only making $1 (usually less) per hour?

The Political Left in America has spent the past decade pushing for a $15 minimum wage because they claim it’s inhumane to work for less. Still, they are perfectly okay with slavery and low wages in other countries as long as it produces cheap products for them at home.

I know, you don’t want to hear this, do you? Because when you see the truth, you feel guilty and prefer blissful ignorance. I never shop at Walmart as it is just a giant funnel, sucking American dollars into communist China.  Yeah, your thirst for cheap products keeps communist regimes propped up as well. Are you good with that too?

So how did we get to a place where we have exported millions of American factory worker jobs and become a significant financial supporter of slavery, child labor, and communism? A combination of greed, tariffs, and leftist ideology.

For all those who say that raising tariffs won’t do anything other than raise prices on consumers:

When all other countries raised tariffs on us, we emptied our country of factories. Do you not think the same thing will happen again, in reverse? Of course it will. This is why we are only a few weeks into this tariff battle, and America is now on the receiving end of several trillion of investment dollars from the likes of Apple, Honda, Taiwan Sem-Conductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Sovereign Wealth Fund (Saudi Arabia), Siemens, Softbank (Japan), Nippon Steel (Japan), Damac Properties (UAE), Sovereign Investment (UAE) and many others.

If tariffs are so bad, why do all the other countries have them? We got rid of tariffs and lost our manufacturing base, while other countries increased tariffs and grew their manufacturing. Is this really all that difficult of a cause and effect to understand?

The leftist propaganda surrounding this issue is unhinged, to say the least. For a couple of weeks, they droned on and on about the markets trending down as they attempted to tie it to the tariffs, but then the markets went up so they had to shut up about that (for now). Markets can change daily for many reasons because there’s always day-to-day volatility. Tariffs are a long game, ultimately resulting in market growth. The DOW will likely hit 50,000+ before the end of Trump’s term because the tariffs will drive so much manufacturing back into the US, but when that happens, the leftist media will never acknowledge it.

The communist left and those suffering from TDS have no real information to offer.  Take this headline, for example, from Wired:

“Why It’s Impossible for Most Small Businesses to Manufacture in the US”

With a sub headline of:

“American companies that make everything from keychains to mattresses say Chinese manufacturing is superior, and tariffs won’t be enough to shift production to the United States.”

And then this is the entirety of the article:

“Dallas-based small business owner Allen Walton says he just sold out of one of his products, a surveillance camera used by law enforcement and private detectives. That would normally be great news for Walton’s electronics company, SpyGuy, which specializes in gadgets like GPS trackers and hidden camera detectors. But thanks to the Trump administration’s ever-shifting tariff policies, Walton says he doesn’t know if he should replenish his stock. His products are mostly manufactured in southern China, and the new additional 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports will completely change the economics of his business.”

NOPE – you aren’t looking at it wrong. The entire article is one freaking paragraph about one person and one business and has ZERO information to support the headline or sub-headline – making this nothing but propaganda.

Want to know how to recognize communists? Look who is putting out propaganda propping up the status quo to keep the financial support for communist regimes, slavery, and child labor in place while simultaneously driving jobs out of the US. Looking at you LinkedIn!