Bill Storr

@bstorr.bsky.social

335 Followers 235 Following

Believes in Kindness, Separation of Church and State, Facts, and Debate. Life is short—think of others.

Congressman Nick Langworthy reposting an image of Trump taking credit for March job numbers all the while the market is crashing.
Apparently the President attempted to use Math to come up with tariff percentages. Math is great as long as it models reality. I feel obligated to enlighten on said reality. The math was the .5* (country’s trade surplus with US)/(country total exports). To the untrained eye if you glance at this someone may think, “Huh. Math. Seems reasonable. He has a methodology”. Here’s are the realities: 1. The other Country doesn’t pay the cost!!!!American consumers do. Therefore WE are getting taxed for the trade imbalance. 2. If we are tariffing items that we can’t efficiently produce in the US (bananas, coffee, most electronics, most apparel, some stainless steel items, some specific car frames, high poluting items, etc) then it doesn’t mean it is still efficient to move the items here…they just get more expensive (see #1). 3. Smaller economies cannot buy more. They don’t have the mass but may export a high value product (like a mines precious mineral/metal in electronics). All the tariffs are doing is increasing the cost on our backs (# 1 again). 4. Expounding on high polluting items (#2). Deregulation of polluting guidelines, along with the tariffs, in an attempt to draw back poluting business to the US is just stupid (bite me Lee Zeldin). None of us want to work in those jobs, have our kids play next to those factories, nor hunt/fish on areas affected by their water runoff or storage of waste. Don’t try to spin it, just don’t do it. So no wondering why the Dow dropped 4%; and this is just the tip of the spear…wait until the price increases embed themselves into the supply chain.
Image from Senator Sue Collins site touting funding restoration of one project and a shipyard that was exempt from a hiring freeze.