It is no secret that I believe these Little Donny tariffs are doing very little to enrich the people of this country and everything to help out his wealthy boot-lickers.

What are these tariffs really all about?

Now, the toughest tariffs by far are on China, and they’re paired with relatively much lower (but still significant) tariffs on the rest of the world while the administration seeks trade deals with various countries in hopes of forming a trade coalition against China.

Trump’s advisers hope that this policy will achieve several things at once: bring manufacturing (and manufacturing jobs) back to the US, address national security concerns about dependence on China, boost US exports, raise revenue to help address the US national debt — and maybe even pave the way toward a restructuring of the global currency system.

If all that sounds fanciful, that’s because it’s extremely fanciful.

Many of those hoped-for benefits are quite implausible and extremely difficult to achieve. Tariffs, meanwhile, bring extremely significant costs and downsides that could very easily wreck his team’s hopes of trying to achieve those lofty aims.

Furthermore, even Trump’s revised tariff policy isn’t at all well-tailored to achieve those aims — it’s still beating up allies we’d need against China, and targeting goods and industries it would make little sense to produce in the US. And his erratic implementation gets in the way even more by ruining businesses’ attempts to plan.

In practice, the only thing Trump is really doing is economic damage – by making things more expensive, chilling investment in the US, reducing confidence in the US’s stability, and casting a pall of uncertainty over everything.

https://www.vox.com/politics/408722/trump-tariffs-bessent-manufacturing-china

So how’s it going collecting these tariffs?

Customs and Border Protection has announced the amount of money it’s taking in under President Trump’s tariffs, and the figures do not agree with the president’s repeated declaration that the US is collecting $2 billion per day. That figure was said to include revenue tied to the tariffs Trump calls reciprocal. But the agency said in a statement this week to CNBC that “since April 5, CBP has collected over $500 million under the new reciprocal tariffs, contributing to more than $21 billion in total tariff revenue from 15 presidential trade actions implemented since Jan 20, 2025.”

And in discussing a system snag that kept freight on the water already from facing the higher tariffs, a situation that lasted 10 hours, the agency said, “Even during the brief glitch, CBP’s average $250 million/day revenue stream remained uninterrupted.” The Treasury Department released data this week reflecting its daily statement of total deposits— “Customs and Certain Excise Taxes”—at $305 million, per CNBC. US Customs collects all tariffs at point of entry.

Money is being collected but that means prices will shoot up…..glad we are collected the cash but at what cost to you and me?

I still not convince the need for these shots at the new trade war that is being fired by Little Donny and his Merry Band of thugs.

Does anyone else see the danger these tariffs impose?

Did you know that tariffs sparked a revolution…..the American Revolution….

The basic economy of the times was this: The Colonies were there to export raw goods to Britain. In the case of Virginia, that was primarily tobacco. British merchants then exported luxury goods to the Colonies that the Colonies couldn’t, or didn’t, produce on their own. The British felt that this was a fine arrangement and that they were helping the Virginia economy, in particular, when they banned British farmers from growing tobacco (not that Britain had a great climate for the leaf).

The Colonists, particularly those in Virginia and Massachusetts, didn’t see it that way. The reason that “debtors” makes its way into the title of Holton’s book is telling. He wasn’t talking about Dickensian debtors living in squalor; he was talking about the Virginia gentry, which found itself constantly in debt to British merchants. Those gentlemen farmers were almost totally dependent on the price of their tobacco exports — which varied wildly — but had to keep up appearances by continuing to import British goods (or so they thought; appearances were very important to them, Holton writes). Various British laws also restricted what the Colonies could produce and how they could sell it. At various times, the British banned the Colonies from making their own iron; Colonists could only sell woolen clothing within their own colony — they couldn’t export it. For anything they did export, such as that precious tobacco, it had to be done on British ships.

That meant Virginia planters couldn’t sell tobacco on the European market, they could only sell it through British middlemen, and those middlemen were the ones who profited most. That merchant class in London was growing in political power at home, so parliament was inclined to listen to what the merchant class wanted, while those Virginia farmers across the ocean had no vote at all. The British felt they were being “indulgent” with their North American Colonies when Parliament repealed the hated Stamp Act. The Fairfax County lawyer-planter George Mason was one who didn’t see it that way at all: “Is the indulgence of Great Britain manifested by prohibiting her colonies from exporting to foreign countries such commodities as she does not want and from importing such as she does not produce of manufacture …?” He was complaining about the restriction on trade; the addition of import duties on what Colonists felt they had to import made matters worse. In modern parlance, the Colonists wanted free trade for their agriculture-based economies.

How tariffs helped spark the American Revolution

Are these modern day tariffs bringing this nation to the cusp of a new American Revolution?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”