OMFG. Welp, guess I’ll be plugging the car in a whole lot more come January when battery life is at its lowest.
Congress needs to get on this BS now. The House of Representatives, Constitutionally, is the only part of the US government allowed to levy taxes. Toilet paper (Canada) and assembled Big 3 cars (Mexico) are not threats to national security, the Act that 45 intends to use applies to things like nuclear reactor or aerospace components, not all the everyday, totally mundane items imported from other countries.
The pipeline of illegal immigration from India has long existed but has increased sharply along the U.S.-Canada border. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending Sept. 30, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
By 2022, the Pew Research Center estimates more than 725,000 Indians were living illegally in the U.S., behind only Mexicans and El Salvadorans.
Paul Krugman (yes yes i know. link though paywalled) today underscores that one of the main ‘hidden’ schemes behind the whole drive for “tariffs! tariffs! tariffs! economics be damned!” is that it’s entirely within presidential prerogatives to grant exceptions to ongoing tariff restrictions. So… if you bribe trump, or are a ‘good republican donor’, your company will be granted exceptions. It’s a protection racket which destroys the property first, and if you pay you get rebuilt. -sigh-
Truly, they run the full gamut, from fanatical cultists, to follow-travelling idealogues, to loyal true believers, to sycophants, to collaborators, to profiteers, to pure thugs.
All the varieties of fascism you could possibly hope to see gathered in one place to be taken out by a single meteor strike.
I first learned that tariffs were bad from a few lines of dialogue in the movie, and I assume play as well, “Life with Father.” This would have been seen on VHS when I was a teenager.
I filed it away in my brain for later.
Everything I have heard about tariffs since then reinforces the point Lavinia Day was making. I even remember some economist in the 90s saying “tariffs only protect the jobs we are bad at.”
I wonder that so many people can go through their lives not piecing basic information together.
That’s part of the appeal of authoritarian ideologies - people don’t have to think.
A lot of people just love this because, I don’t know, thinking hurts their brains or something.
