Tariff-ied Of Globalism
Trump Aims An Outmoded Weapon ... At An Inevitability.
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. I am no economist. In fact, I’m so disinterested in money that I don’t even know how much is in the investment account that I started 12 years ago with my 20% share from the sale of our family home. When my dad died and my mom became incapacitated.
I never spent a penny of it. I don’t think about that money, except to wonder vaguely when I ought to hand it over to my daughter. It’s always been, in my eyes, the inheritance that my kids will need someday.
I’m guessing that this phantom ‘nest-egg’ shrunk substantially over the last couple of weeks. And then possibly regained what it lost? I don’t know, and I don’t much care.
I’m no economist.
Having said that, I’ve been inundated of late with innumerable online discussions of tariffs. And given that I have both Trump lovers and Trump haters on my social-media feeds, I’ve also been privy to a lot of emoting about how Trump is either destroying our economy or saving it with a stiff dose of Tough Love.
I’m embarrassed to say so, but I never really gave much thought to tariffs. I vaguely understood what most Trumpers don’t seem to … that tariffs are taxes on the receiving party. That American manufacturers will pay Trump’s tariffs when parts and pieces arrive from China or Canada or Mexico. Here’s a very good video that the center-right Wall Street Journal made just before the 2024 election. Take eight minutes to watch it.
Hopefully your memory is now refreshed about Trump’s 2018 tariffs on Chinese made washing machines. How it drove up the cost of not only imported washers, but American-made washers as well. And dryers too. This for the creation of about 1,800 stateside manufacturing jobs.
The US government made about $82 million annually from these taxes on Maytag and LG and Samsung and others. But the cost to consumers was $1.5 billion each year. That’s seventeen times more cost bourn by regular citizens, than taken into the government’s coffers.
Now I haven’t bought a washer and dryer in over forty years. I remember spending almost exactly a thousand dollars when I bought a matched Maytag set as a gift to my then fiancé. But when I asked Google to track the price of washing machines over the last decade, this is the AI Overview that I got.
Generally the prices had been trending down. Why? Globalization had made everything cheaper (I groan remembering that I also paid a grand for a VCR that was soon half as good as one that cost half as much).
The downward trend in these appliances was interrupted only by adding a tariff. By the by … here’s what an equivalent set of Maytag appliances costs now, from a local retailer.
Up only 10% in four decades. The house that we bought shortly after I bought those washers cost us $150,000. It’s price would now be approximately 400% higher.
If not for Trump’s tariffs, the cost of buying a pair of Maytags would not have climbed at all!
Do you think that foreign-made goods are really what’s holding back the American lower-middle class? It seems to me that ‘cost of living’ indices point away from foreign-made goods and toward housing, medical care, car insurance, and our own lavish spending habits on luxuries like booze and tattoos.
Further, do you think that ‘The American Dream’ is still attainable on the wages paid by American manufacturers, who might build new factories here because tariffs have forced them back home?
Remember, it is only when internationally sourced goods get so expensive due to these Trump tax hikes, that a manufacturer is incentivized to make all of the investment in Iowa, for example, that would enable him to hire Iowans. The resulting American-made stuff will be at least as expensive as the foreign goods have become due to the high tariffs.
And these will not be $30 an hour positions like the MILLIONS of skilled industrial jobs that are RIGHT NOW going unfilled because Americans won’t take them.
Maybe Trump should explain how he intends to choke off the supply of immigrants willing to work cheap, while simultaneously reindustrializing the heartland, with an economic technique that will assuredly drive prices UP for those already reeling from the inflationary legacy of the COVID pandemic.
Who’s going to build the factories? Who’s going to work their assembly lines?
Speaking of the pandemic, and inflation, let’s briefly look at that.
Trump’s washing-machine taxation created a sector-specific price bump. Just washing machines right? But as the video says, dryer prices followed the upward trend. And American-made washers went up too!
This is the down-side of capitalism, isn’t it? Once prices go up, and people adjust to them, they stay high. This is based on the capitalist notion of pricing at ‘whatever the market will bear’.
When California shut down many tens of thousands of mom & pop businesses as COVID lingered, taxpayers had to divvy up tens of billions just so that these businesses could barely scrape by for a year.
Restaurants are an easy way to track how inflationary that whole thing was. After being shuttered for many months, proprietors needed to adjust their prices upward. So when reopening, they had to print up dozens of new menus, all laminated nicely and bound at the edges with faux leather. That ain’t cheap.
They couldn’t just add on the typical cost-of-living adjustment that they’d do every couple of years. No. They now needed to replenish their own drained bank accounts, and maybe do some advertising as well to get customers back. So the 8-dollar Burrito Deluxe jumped to 12-dollars. And, in that business, there is no going back.
Now, in Los Angeles, you see all over the place, what only elite diners ever even knew was a thing. Menus with no prices on them at all. This is a psychological trick based on the insecurity of patrons. Who wants to inquire about prices at a hip new eatery on date-night? Talk about your loser move!
Even food-trucks have gotten in on the act. Whereas it was universal practice to post big colorful menus with prices clearly marked, now many of these traveling restaurants make you ask how much your Thai-fusion taco will cost.
We do it to ourselves. Willingly paying $600 for a pair of concert tickets. Swapping out our wardrobes every year, because fashion says we should. Playing Amazon like a video game every time we feel slightly behind the trend. These things aren’t the fault of China and Mexico and Vietnam.
This is our own emptiness speaking. It is WE who need to own everything. We’re the ones who buy 3,500 sq. ft. houses and then have to furnish every room as if the queen might visit.
And why, oh why, does ANYBODY pay $1,200 for an iPhone built in China, when a $200 Samsung - also built in China - does everything just as well? Why!? Because the marketing was better on the Macintosh way back when we all got hooked on computers.
Consumerism is the disease. Globalization is the maintenance of symptoms.
But I digress.
It seems to me that Donald J Trump makes a very unkind assumption about his base. He not only assumes them to be ignorant, but he also assumes them to be xenophobic.
He plays to the knowledge that - in Red America - the terms ‘globalization’, and ‘globalism’ are synonymous. They aren’t really. The first refers to the nuts and bolts of international trade, and treaties, and all of the free-market exchanges that have steadily lifted a few billion humans out of the worst kinds of poverty.
The second deals more with the ‘philosophical’ idea of nationhood. That countries contain ‘a people’ who share something precious just by dint of geography.
Right of center, it’s felt that this sense of national identity is being quickly eroded by loose borders, a cacophony of languages, and strange rituals involving strange gods.
Right of center, the multicultural artifacts of globalization FEEL like an intentional unraveling of America, by the ‘philosophy’ of Globalism. As attached at the hip to Liberalism.
When George H W Bush spoke of The New World Order way back in 1990, he was speaking almost entirely about nuclear arms and international security.
But if you searched the term on YouTube during the Obama years, you’d likely tumble into a deep and deeply paranoid rabbit-hole. Trump rose on the insecurity of a population that fears losing its collective self in the same way that its members had lost so much of their individual selves.
It’s no accident that all over the world, authoritarians are grabbing the reins. (I’ll dig into this deeper at a later date)
This fear of cultural erosion is linked to fear of DEI measures. It’s hard enough for a person who grew up where a college education was rare, not to feel outrun and left behind. To see others fast-tracked, is like salt in a wound.
Add to this an army of AM talk hosts with producers who scan the news each dawn for a morsel of collegiate weirdness, at some super-woke campus in Vermont or Northern California. The talkers amplify these to the max, gluing listeners to their radios as if they are hearing reports of bombers coming in over the horizon.
Add to that, Hollywood’s determination to place women into every historically male role - even in the grittiest action flicks.
Trump’s disciples feel the old-order retreating, and think not only that the future is female, but that the future is trans, and every kindergarten will soon have Drag-Queen Story Hour, every Thursday morning before nap-time.
With this sort of cultural erosion at home, they are scared shitless of what will be coming in from abroad. Truly, they feel as if money traveling overseas in exchange for goods … is funding the eventual demise of the only identities they have left - American, and Christian.
What they miss, is that - until these last 95 days - there was an unspoken world order that has proved quite durable. And The United States has set the tone of this more thoroughly than any other country.
It’s because we haven’t gotten caught up in these petty tit-for-tat pissing contests that Trump seems to live for.
We are the country of choice for every sort of immigrant, because we are admired the whole world over. And not only for the size of our collective phallus. But for the size of our collective heart.
Yes, China is now the leader in manufacturing. They are The World’s Factory. But what they make is primarily driven by what Americans want.
The Chinese now dress like us, learn English in school, and emigrate here if they possibly can. Where Mùchén becomes Steve, and Yan becomes Betsy.
Our dollars have funded a massive Westernization of China. The astonishing progress taking place there since 1970 is not them worshipping their Chinese-ness, but them casting it off at a rate that history will marvel at.
We aren’t becoming them. They are becoming us.
Remember, China is a country that once walled itself off from the outside world for hundreds of years, letting its vast navy rot in port, as it proved how destructive isolationism is in a world where resources are as widely distributed as human capital.
I think it’s pretty stupid to fear being interdependent with Canada and Mexico. Somewhere in his primate brain-stem, Trump senses that these three countries constitute a more unified North America.
But his cerebral cortex has been so underutilized that he can’t see that as a good and proper development that simply needs occasional refining. Like his father before him, he sees everything as a zero-sum battle for territory. He wants to annex, not cooperate.
That’s just a primitive way of thinking.
I wrote this piece over the course of several days, as I turned most of my attention to other things. Rebuilding our equipment for a show coming up. Rehearsing with bandmates old and possibly new. Examining the newly cleared carcass of the property where I lived in Altadena, with an eye to either moving back or moving on.
As I returned to finish writing on this Monday morning, I fully expected news that some will see as giving the lie to my thinking.
This is how chaos works. Anybody opining about our current situation, hovers a shaky finger over the ‘SEND’ icon, knowing that news is about to break that will knock the crap out of their story.
That development on this day was that Nvidea has announced that it will be investing hundreds of billions into facilities in Arizona. A family member who leans MAGA posted the story with glee.
My very first thought was, “I wonder if their CEO, Jensen Huang, is one of Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters.”
A minute on Google told me that Huang had attended the $1million a plate dinner at Mar A Lago ten days or so ago.
Then I read a little deeper in what he plans to build in AZ. This will be a factory for AI super-computers. You see, Nvidia is deeply invested in Artificial Intelligence.
My next thought was: “Hmmm … I wonder if Huang’s company is into robotics.”
Of course they are. I found this adorable-robot video in seconds. From just three weeks ago.
So yeah. Soon Americans will be busy in Arizona, building AI super-computers to power the robots that will then take those jobs, even as autonomous vehicles un-employ everybody from open-road truckers to that nice gal who drives little McKenna’s school-bus.
The future is coming on fast. We CANNOT AFFORD to be locked into an intellectual/entrepreneurial war with ANY advanced nation. We need to be building the alliances that will allow us to manage a largely automated industrial world.
As AI bots take over, we MUST be sure that humans everywhere are protected from the machines doing all of that machine-learning.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got right now.
I have humans to attend to. Relationships to build and manage and sometimes discontinue. Thanks for your patience, and for sharing and ‘liking’ these pieces. The last one got almost 950 views. The 2nd most ever for this humble blog in a far corner of the internet.
I have no such expectations for this one. But thanks, as always, for reading.
-Dave
We all have opinions. My opinion is that tariffs is just a big bazooka Trump is threatening to use to induce other nations to do certain things. For example, Trump believes (and is correct) that European nations aren't pulling their weight financing NATO, and if they pony up to Trump's target of X% GDP, then the tariffs go away. And if Mexico stops illegal migrants & fentanyl into the USA, he'll lower tariffs against them as well. The economic theory is that if a tariff raises a foreign product to sell at X dollars, that sets the market price of domestic products to the same X dollars. But if my scenario is correct... and Trump's tariffs don't get implemented because NATO countries raise their contributions to the alliance... (et cetera) then we may not experience the economic Armageddon the commentators are all antsy about.
Hey Dave, just a late comment to let you know I’ve been sitting on reading your columns. I’ve got a minute now waiting on a friend who had a doctor’s visit. Thanks for continuing your writing. Nate