Triumph or Disaster. It's Our Choice!

Party Pooper Podcast

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Triumph or Disaster. It's Our Choice!

Potential tariff scenarios

Matt Jordan

Apr 09, 2025

Transcript

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Apropos of nothing, but have you caught the last two Mall rallies in DC? They were a circus of old fogies trying to rekindle the 60’s (they think their youth was more important than anyone else’s) and young ‘uns who heard of the 60s and are desperate to have a 60s of their own. It’s embarrassing to watch. The geriatric political hacks two weeks ago at the podium with a guitar trying to get the audience to sing folk songs…ugh!

And both “rallies” were staged events. There was nothing organic or grass roots about either event. They started and stopped on the clock.

Has anybody seen my old friend Bobby? Can you tell me where’s he’s gone…. Oh, Christ!

And what the hell are they protesting? DOGE is working around the clock to prevent the waste of the your money that the government has it’s filthy meat hooks all over. The goal is to eventually get it back to you. No benefits have been cut. No rights have even been discussed, nor will they be.

But so far, this nonsense is the only approach the Left has to the real business of living.

Oh, well. To business!

I’ll start with an acknowledgement that few mention, especially among the blind followers of the tariff regime. The Unites States of America is SUPPOSED to have trade deficits. We are at once the richest nation in the world. More and more, that is just a reality on paper. But we are. We are one of the two most productive nations in the world. We sell more and consume more than anyone. So, yeah, you cannot BALANCE that out, and you don’t want to. That does not excuse the rest of the world for putting up artificial barriers on our goods. In doing so they hurt their own people as much as they hurt us. If their people want our goods THEIR GOVERNMENTS make them pay anywhere from 10% to 290% more for those goods.

That’s cowardly and stupid. If a Canadian pays $3 extra dollars for American milk, that’s $2 less each has to pursue other activities. Read Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt.

It’s not accident I use the example of Canada and milk. They slam our milk with insane tariffs and destroy millions of gallons of milk every year to keep the price of domestic milk UP! And Canadians put up with that shit! I also use Canada a lot in these discussions because they stand the most to lose if they get this wrong. If the libs remain in power there, their economy WILL tank.

As I said before, on this Substack, the idea of allowing other countries to fuck with our trading status was born out of their need to rebuild after war or develop so they could become players in the global markets. A noble and forward-thinking approach to commerce. But the tariffs we tolerated were only intended to be a shirt term cash infusion to stand up manufacturing and infrastructure.

Sadly, countries like Canada have made the existence of tariff income a permanent pillar of their economies. Several generations of economists and politicians came of age factoring the extra money, a tax on their own people and a barrier to our goods as a constant factor in making economic decisions.

They have literally built everything they have on the backs of American workers and entrepreneurs. That means their status vis-a-vis the United States is artificial. It isn’t sound economics. It’s a form theft. It’s theft we have tolerated. To be certain, through the use of “speaking fees” (BJ Bill), contributions to “foundations” (BJ Bill’s wife and Obama) and outright cash payments (the Biden crime syndicate and Mitch McConnell) these nations were able to keep tariffs in place long after they should have been countered by the US. Certainly their is a much longer list of politicians who have gotten some kind of kickback, even if it’s campaign donations, to keep the economic abuses in place.

For better or for worse, Trump has finally said, “no mas!”

There are all manner of ways the Trump Tariff scheme succeeds or fails. If you’ve been with me for more than a few weeks, you know I would not have used tariffs as my weapon of choice. That doesn’t mean they won’t have the desired effect. They might. But tariffs are a drag on any free-market economy.

As this saga unfolds, and I listen to the TDS victims, I am reminded of how the world usually treats Israel. Since 1948, with the exception of the ‘67 war wherein the armies of 5 nations were already formed at Israel’s borders, Israel has always RESPONDED to attacks. They didn’t look for opportunities to launch them.

In every case we’d immediately hear how BOTH sides need to practice restraint and how evil Israel is for punching back. The initial attacks that cause the fighting get a passing mention at best, always smothered with excuses offered by what is supposed to be an honest media.

Now, we have Trump FINALLY deciding punch back on a world that has been jacking us up for decades, pricing our goods out of the market, or at best just making them less competitive in their domestic markets. The indignation by political opponents, and “academia” douche bags, is Orwellian. I have read repeatedly that tariffs are bad and Trump ought not employ them.

Wait…what? Nations around the globe have been doing it to us since WWII. Never a word has been uttered about it (except by Democrat politicians in the 90s). No, it’s all how bad Trump is for imposing tariffs. I have yet to hear a single talking head in legacy media or read an article, even in the WSJ, railing against tariffs imposed on us!

That idiot PM of the UK says global trade is dead because of Trump’s tariffs. Everyone else’s tariffs, they’re okay. We put them up and trade is dead. Can you see the absurdity?

So how will it all pan out?

The possibilities are too numerous to capture entirely. However, we can make general assumptions.

Politics

First is Congress. There are Dems and a few Swamp rat RINOs already submitting legislation to stomp on Trump’s plans. NONE of these political whores has an alternative solution to the kind of trade imbalances. As we’ve seen many have a financial interest in keeping their own country behind the eight ball…Mitch! Read Secret Empires by Peter Schweitzer.

If the House leadership stands their ground and let’s this thing play out, we WILL see incentives for companies to move here. This is something that must happen quickly. With the potential damage we could do to China, it needs to happen 5 years ago!

The Domestic Market

There will obviously be a shift in purchasing. Wherever there is a choice on offer, more people will buy American IF most American manufacturers and retailers don’t respond to this new market like a pack of drooling assholes. Let me explain:

We use foreign-made wrench A, Domestic wrench B and Domestic wrench C. We’ll assume all three are of the same quality. The principal will apply to all goods.

A sells for $23.

B sells for $27

C sells for $27

With the new tariffs, we’ll say wrench A is from China and now sells for $32. The domestic tool manufacturers consider their positions. B decides to sell their wrench for $31.50. He knows he can still beat the foreign brand and make a killing. C says, “I am now competing with other domestic brands, so I will assume some market volatility and and inflation, so I will price my wrench at $28 and still make a profit.

In the last round of tariffs we saw American appliance manufacturers chose the B route. So the consumer got a double whammie. Higher prices for foreign goods and ALMOST equally higher prices for domestic goods. Then the American manufacturers complained of slacking sales despite the tariffs. Greed can make you stupid.

If domestic companies play the long game, like wrench C, and don’t kill ALL the apatite for their goods, they will move mountains of goods by volume and we all prosper. I am not sanguine, kiddies.

Wall Street

As I said in a recent post, the reaction to the tariff scheme is fueled by two things. One is the fact that investment banks and high rollers have money in funds and equities all over the world. It will take a while for them to balance out their portfolios to reflect the new reality. They will sell billions of overseas assets, then watch. They may buy back some based on unexpected strength. They may sell off more after seeing further decline on market share of XYZ foreign equity.

Many amateurs and shitty brokers, who have no business trading stock, will panic and drag the market down further. It’s worth noting in 2008/09, amateur day traders did better than professionals in many cases.

But the coolest heads on Wall Street right now are quietly BUYING. This is a temporary downturn. The market WILL come back. The coolest of heads are going to make a killing as the first two groups come back into the market. If Trump is using the tariffs to create real free trade on the back end, they’ll all make money, a lot of it.

What is Trump’s game?

We don’t know yet. We’ve heard him speak enthusiastically about countries offering zero for zero on tariffs. We also heard Trump say the Tariffs will be a source of revenue for the government to pay down debt and possibly replace taxes. If zero barrier, free trade is the goal, GREAT! We’ll get there pretty quick and all the smart countries will benefit. Consumers will benefit the most. If his goal is the latter - revenue - we WILL end up in a tariff war and after a ridiculous pissing contest, we will return to a world not unlike the one we were in before the first tariff was laid on by the US. All consumers will be poorer for it. We will have accomplished exactly nothing. That’s how all tariff wars end.

My Alternative

I have criticized every pundit and knucklehead, who have gotten the vapors over the Trump tariffs, for not having an alternative to offer. So it is incumbent upon me to provide one. And I can!

For the hardcore P4B fan, this will not be a new concept. IF YOU WANT FREE TRADE, SIMPLY INSIST ON FREE TRADE. And then be prepared to carry it out yourself. And this goes to subsidies as well. You announce by a date certain that all foreign goods being sold in the United States will have no barriers in place upon them. All good we export will not be subject to barriers of any kind. That’s no tariffs on things coming in and no subsidies on goods going out. No exceptions. Watch out sugar industry! Stand by oil industry!

A subsidy is the mirror image of a tariff and an abuse of the end user. Does China want to sell us middling computer chips and medicine bottles, fine! Bring it. And our wheat will pour into your country unabated. If any country has a problem with that, okay. We feel ya. But you’ve sold your last widget in the USA!

You can make it easy on them as well. Give them a year to wind down their tariff and subsidy programs so their markets and manufacturers can adjust. Now we have a global FREE market based on REAL economics, not the market manipulation and political chicanery we call economics today.

Oh, but MJ! What about quality? What about countries that use pesticides or GMO or cheap rubber…blah, blah, blah…. Right. Shop for the alternative. Buy quality. And good luck with the pesticide thing. Expensive, mushy, wormy food isn’t my idea of good eatin’.

And guess what, boys and girls! We’d still have a trade deficit with just about every country, because we’d still be the richest country with the most consumption on the planet. It comes with the territory.

But consumers would pay what a thing is actually worth in a competitive market - no surcharge, no discount, unless the retailer is running a sale. We can’t ask for more. And we shouldn’t.