All indicators are that Trump is going to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico today. The chaos is part of the whole experience.
Anyway, a couple of interesting reads on this. First, the Bank of Canada has an article on the impact of tariffs, including the diagram above. Key points are that both countries will take a hit to GDP, inflation will probably grow, demand for products will fall, and unemployment will grow (due to loss of jobs due to lack of demand).
Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard reiterated that tariffs on Mexican exports would have an adverse impact on consumers in the United States.
“You have to take into account … that Mexico is the main exporter [to the United States] of final goods such as cars, computers, televisions and refrigerators,” he told Sheinbaum’s press conference.
“… United States consumers would be affected” by the tariffs, Ebrard said.
“In first place because prices will be higher. The price of all those products will rise 25%,” he said.
Ebrard also said that a 25% tariff on Mexican exports would diminish the availability of Mexican-made (or grown) products in the United States, and that the duty could cause supply chain problems in a range of sectors including the auto industry.
The “main impact,” he stressed, is that “millions of families in the United States will have to pay 25% more” for a wide range of products including Mexican fruit, vegetables, meat and beer.
One of the reasons I bought a new truck at the end of last year was I was expecting Trump tariffs to add thousands to the cost of a vehicle. Well, here we are.
evodevo
Yep…us too. Truck, tires for the Kubota, new computer, etc. etc. We can’t afford to stock up on EVERYTHING that will be affected, but got this stuff ahead of the debacle at least.
A Ghost to Most
Let them feel it, good and hard. And that’s just our relatives.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Wasn’t Trump afraid of Claudia Sheinbaum and wouldn’t impose tariffs on Mexico?
jonas
And you can’t just go “Well, I’ll just buy an alternative product made here and skip the tariffs!” Everything made here has parts sourced from global supply chains and in particular supply chains connected to Mexico and Canada. This numbnuts, who got his stupid ass elected again solely because voters were pissed about high consumer and food prices, is about to … *checks notes*… raise food and consumer prices by another 25%.
I predict this well thought-out scheme will go over very well.
Baud
What’s the hold up on the tariffs?
different-church-lady
“Well, as long as the price of eggs goes down I’m all for HEY, 8 BUCKS A DOZEN WAIT WHAT THE FUCK?”
Steve LaBonne
@different-church-lady: As they continue to mismanage the avian flu crisis, soon you will be lucky to find eggs at any price.
different-church-lady
@Steve LaBonne: Yes, because we’ll all be dead from bird flu.
Starfish (she/her)
@different-church-lady: You have access to eggs and do not live the empty-shelf reality that Trump is creating that looks like various communist totalitarian governments of old?
CaseyL
Wonder if we’ll see a wave of suppliers in Mexico and Canada enter into “ownership partnerships” with US companies to get exemptions from the tariffs, if there is such a loophole.
One thing we won’t see is a wave of US-based companies taking up the slack, because the infrastructure support just won’t be there. Even if you eliminate any and all permitting requirements, you still need to run plumbing and sewage facilities, and have a source of abundant electricity. Not to mention stuff like roads, bridges, and alla that. All the things that Red states (where the RW will want the new companies to be) haven’t funded properly in decades.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
That should reduce demand for eggs.
CliosFanBoy
OT, but important. Can anyone recommend a good Android app that saves your video DIRECTLY to the cloud as you record it? I’m obviously thinking about how to record ICE or other such brownshirt agencies if they raid my class or church or neighbors, etc.
Steve LaBonne
@different-church-lady: Well that too. I’m tempted to think of that as a relief, like the giant meteor.
Baud
@CliosFanBoy:
YouTube app does it. But I’ve only done it a handful of times.
Steve LaBonne
@CliosFanBoy: Some state ACLU affiliates have or had such apps (not Ohio alas).
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@CliosFanBoy: I think you can live-stream on YouTube and your video is saved to your account there.
ETA – checked this and it wasn’t obvious how to live stream. Maybe Twitch?
Raoul Paste
I really don’t see the purpose of the tariffs, considering the effective takeover of the entire government already. What is to be gained? General bullying of nearby countries to get their subservience?
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think he’s afraid of her but he’s in full YOLO mode right now. She thought he wouldn’t do it, but she says that Mexico is ready. It’s going to be ugly.
Steve LaBonne
@Raoul Paste: Once Trump gets a stupid idea stuck in his stupid head, nobody can talk him out of it. And of all things he most hates being seen to back down. That’s for losers.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Raoul Paste: Hasn’t he said income from tariffs would replace the income tax?
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
He backs down a lot. For all we know, this will be in place for two days, and he gets some nothing burger “concession” out of it, and declares himself a big winner. His base isn’t discerning, nor the media. They’ll eat up anything.
hells littlest angel
@Baud: Yeah remember the great Colombian Tariff War from the other day? Whew, that was something else!
cain
I bought my game machine with nvidia card and so on and a bunch of other stuff knowing that it was going to be a shit show this year because of tariffs.
Let’s not forget a lot of small businesses who have small margins are going to die because taking a 25% hit on anything is going to be disastrous. Our millennials and gen zs are going to be going through once again everything that happened back in the early 2000s. I hope these generations take note that all this always happened during a Republican administration.
But hey white grievance is a powerful drug, but hopefully they can live on it.
Another Scott
@Raoul Paste: Yes, he wants to break every governmental norm and make himself the “decider” on everything.
Have 2.2M people resign? Hey, maybe you’ll get your job back if you sign an NDA and a loyalty oath to the Great Leader. Or maybe not? Who knows??
The NAFTA successor he negotiated with Canada and Mexico (USMCA) supposedly makes these tariffs illegal. E.g.
But Great Leader is not constrained by laws if he can say “INVASION” and thinks he can use some obscure section of an inapplicable part of the US Code. Who’s going to stop him??
Grr…
As many have pointed out, the chaos is a deliberate strategy to overwhelm us and make us give up and give in. Don’t do it.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
@hells littlest angel:
Exactly.
Stability is boring. The people demand entertainment.
Percysowner
We may, or may not, have attacked somebody overseas, maybe Somalia? I mean it’s Trump flapping his gums, and no one other than Truth Social has confirmed, so who knows.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: But he always has to do the stupid stuff first so he can then pretend he got what he wanted. And as Krugman has explained, the damage from demonstrating that our word on free-trade agreements is worth shit will be permanent.
cain
@jonas: They got nobody to blame but themselves. They didn’t believe anything that came out of his mouth and he is delivering exactly what he said.
Hows our loud mouth Trumpers these days? I haven’t heard much peep out of them.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
How positively 1789-1862 of him*
*Where “customs duties” aka, tariffs, were the primary form of income of the US gubmint.
But, since we’re in the Gilded Age 2.0, why not? I’m waiting for us to go back on the gold standard although I get the sense these clowns think crypto is some derivative of that.
different-church-lady
@Raoul Paste: As Johnny Rotten put it, “All we’re trying to do is destroy everything.”
Another Scott
@Percysowner: TBogg breaking the news.
Interesting.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Steve LaBonne
@cain: Clearly they never heard the fable of the scorpion and the frog.
Raoul Paste
@Steve LaBonne: This is a good point about Trump violating his own trade agreement. Of course, our general public doesn’t know this, but foreign countries do
Papa Boyle
Trumpflation
different-church-lady
@Baud: Or, as I put it yesterday:
RaflW
Since it’s a politics/mistermix thread: Ken Martin, up to now the chair of the MN Democratic Party (technically the MN DFL*) has been elected to run the DNC.
He was my second choice (not that I have a vote), but kind of a distant second after Ben Wickler. At least Wisconsin will still have a brilliant guy in charge.
I’m not super fired up about this, but also not waiving the “I quit!” flag (which I’m already seeing from some Bsky folks who aren’t coping with Ben not getting the job.)
*Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, though I have doubts about how many in the F part are with us. When Trump screws all the poultry producers over bird flu, it’d be nice to see some ag voters return.
Captain C
@Baud:
Hell, even if he doesn’t get any concessions and keeps the tariffs and trashes the economy, the FTFNYT headline will be, “Trump Wins Major Victory as Dow Jones plunges 5,000 %”
Op-Ed piece: “Why this is all Biden’s, Obama’s, Clinton’s, and Carter’s Fault” by Bobo, Chunky Reese, Bedbug, and Pinch the Lesser
ETA: His base could watch him send the military into a disastrous war, including aircraft carriers getting sunk on live TV, and convince themselves it was a win. Full-immersion VR can’t get here soon enough for these people.
different-church-lady
@RaflW: Here we are in 1930s Germany and the Lefter-Than-You’ll-Ever-Bes are still going home with their ball if they can’t have every single fucking thing exactly how they want it.
MomSense
The goal of Trump and the broligarchs is to crash the economy. Then after they burn it down they will buy what they want at fire sale prices.
Tim C
@evodevo: Bought a new computer in November, likewise, we thought about buying a car, but decided we can keep going with what we have.
Honestly, this is feeling a lot like the week or two before COVID lockdowns started. I can see what’s going on and so can anyone making an effort to pay attention, but so many people are in denial…
Steve LaBonne
@Raoul Paste: Nobody will ever again trust the US to honor its agreements, nor should they. The damage to American influence will be huge and permanent. I expect de-dollarization of the world economy within a few years.
Captain C
@Baud: People like that should burn down their own house first if they’re that desperate for destructive live entertainment. Maybe their oversized vehicle next.
Captain C
@different-church-lady: But hey, it’s our fault for not fixing the Republicans, or something.
RaflW
@different-church-lady: There’s some legitimate anger that Dems seem to have been caught so flat-footed when Trump is unleashing Project 2025 basically as written and advertised for the past year and a half. What did party leaders think was going to happen? Why was this not prepped for better than it has been, and erstwhile presidential candidates like Amy Klobuchar still fluffing endlessly for bipartisanship with Nazi-enablers feels like an abandonment of the base what brung her.
I guess I’m a holier than thou, huh.
Steve LaBonne
@MomSense: Just the broligarchs. Trump is stupid enough to really believe that he’s making America great again.
Starfish (she/her)
@different-church-lady: I didn’t pay attention to the majority of white bros hoping to run the DNC, but I could see how it could work. We will see. I am glad that Martin O’Malley didn’t get it. He was as interesting as a bowl of vanilla pudding.
Do you think some Midwest nice people could rescue us from our coastal elites?
Tim C
@Baud: This seems most likely.
Steve LaBonne
@RaflW: Show us where you predicted that Musk would embed himself in the Federal personnel system before the end of January.
different-church-lady
@Baud:
JUVENAL: “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.”
TRUMP: “Wait, why should we give them bread?”
Raoul Paste
@Steve LaBonne: The reserve currency issue is something that I don’t know how to plan for
Starfish (she/her)
@MomSense: What do they want to buy that they cannot already afford now? They are flying around in their private jets, raising a herd of Waigu in Kauai, and have already built their underground bunker. What is it that they want from us? Being a billionaire is a brain disease, and we are going to have to jack up their taxes a lot to recover from the smash and grab.
Steve LaBonne
@different-church-lady: Hitler gave the Germans bread until the war. Then Putin gave Russians shit sandwiches without the bread and showed that Hitler needn’t have bothered.
Hilbertsubspace
There must be a price point for eggs* where vaccinating the newborn chickens as a preventative becomes viable. Do we not know enough about chicken immune systems to create one?
*Actuarial work is a bit boring, but plenty of people can do it
P.S. The vaccines aren’t that good and there are other problematic factors is what it looks like
P.P.S. Apparently some countries do vaccinate their poultry.
Percysowner
@RaflW:
Oh, Jeeze! We’re in this pickle because the Bernie bros couldn’t cope with him not getting the job. Stop whining and start working! And be aware if we don’t hang together, we will certainly hang apart because we are heading toward a declaration of martial law and banishing elections.
different-church-lady
@RaflW: Comment wasn’t aimed at you — I don’t see you threatening to quit in a snit.
different-church-lady
@Starfish (she/her):
All of it.
Steve LaBonne
@Percysowner: Just here to point out that favorite Berniebro punching bags Pelosi and Schumer endorsed Wikler. Jeffries as well.
Harrison Wesley
@Percysowner: DOD statement that we launched airstrikes on ISIS sites in Somalia.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
They want you to respect them.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Then they’re going to need more money.
Jeffro
For months…or is it years?…I have been adding “what would we call it if saw it happening in another country?” to my social media posts, hoping it would help wake up low-info friends and family about what trump & Co are all about.
Well, I’m not the only one with that great idea: Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government
I hope he keeps it up!
More importantly, I hope they set up a site where reporters and writers can take every last bit of trump/musk insanity and write it up as if it were happening in another country
(OR…writing it up as if it were a bunch of Democrats doing it)
“Obama begins FBI purges”, for example
Baud
@different-church-lady:
That’s the plan.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MomSense:
Wouldn’t that be very bad for them electorally? And who’s to say people won’t revolt in mass
Citizen Alan
@Steve LaBonne: I’ve never heard a version of the Scorpion and the Frog fable in which the Frog miraculously survives getting stung and then begs the Scorpion to continue the journey with him for more.
Captain C
@Starfish (she/her):
Legit love and respect from those they consider lesser and unworthy. Even their billions and toys and power aren’t enough for them because there is a rotten, stinking hole where their heart should be, and they’re too lazy and clueless to try and fix their own problems.
ed. for spelling and grammar
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
People may revolt but until they learn to stick with us, it won’t matter much.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@different-church-lady: Which is exactly what happened in 1930’s Germany. And Jesus fucking Christ on pogo stick, it’s already been shown Trump backs down when he push back, but here comes to Holy Than Thou left to put a stop to that.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@MomSense: Musk would lose on that one big time, all his money is just basically what he might have if he sold all his Tesla stock.
Oh, and Tesla missed it earning last quarter.
J. Arthur Crank
@Baud:
The people are revolting.
Eolirin
@Steve LaBonne: I don’t think it has to be permanent. But it’ll take decades to rebuild trust, assuming we can get back to sanity.
RevRick
@Steve LaBonne: The operative word here is stupid. Trump’s stupidity is as vast as the ocean. He’s convinced he knows more than any expert, and is fixated on the McKinley years, which he imagines was America’s peak prosperity. He wants to duplicate his fantasy. Minus the muckrakers.
The thing is, the US was the world’s industrial giant back then, and was, in many respects, an autarky. It’s no coincidence that the next twenty years was the Progressive Era, addressing many of the ills that had been building in the Gilded Age.
Trump is way over his head. But because he is stupid, he will go full steam ahead with his harebrained tariffs.
Miss Bianca
@Hilbertsubspace: Kind of surprised we’re *not* vaccinating commercial poultry flocks already, now that I think about it .
jonas
@Harrison Wesley: That’s unpossible. I thought one of Trump’s great triumphs in his first term was utterly destroying ISIS.
jonas
I see what you did there.
Steve LaBonne
@jonas: You’re just in denali about what’s happening.
Eolirin
@Steve LaBonne: Get out :p
Eolirin
@CaseyL: Biden was trying to do something about that. Trump has of course attempted to freeze all of that money too.
Eolirin
@Eolirin: The Germans managed to recover from Nazism ffs. Rehabilitation of major powers is always possible.
p.a.
Who will Marshall Plan us?
But really, I’m optimistic about the US economy’s ability to bounce back if sanity returns. At least until climate change does us all in.
Layer8Problem
@Baud:
Colonel Korn: “Like us. Join us. Be our pal. Say nice things about us. . . . Become one of the boys.”
different-church-lady
@Eolirin: Well yeah, but with a major assist and uh… total defeat as part of the process.
RevRick
Tomorrow, some of the Church celebrates Candlemas, an ancient rite connected to the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. According to Luke 2:22, Mary and Joseph went to the Temple for the rite of purification (for a woman 40*days following the birth of a male child). While there they encountered a man and woman who recognized that Jesus was destined for something significant. Simeon was described as righteous and devout, and Anna was called a prophet.
*40 occurs frequently in the Bible and is symbolically associated with times of trial, testing, and transformation. The most logical explanation for this number is that it coincides with a full-term pregnancy.
Captain C
@Harrison Wesley: I think the pattern will ultimately be that TCFG will only strike at those who can’t actually hit back.
patrick II
I hope you like your truck. I bought prison stock.
matt
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I’ve been worrying someone’s going to tell him about the Stamp Act.
different-church-lady
@Captain C: Just like every bully ever.
hitchhiker
@Tim C:
I sent a very measured and linked msg to one of my chat groups last night about the Musk situation, warning them that it was bad and more or less giving them permission to shut their eyes if they were already in an I-just-can’t-deal frame of mind.
This is white women in their 70s, all of whom are dealing with the usual issues of disability, instability, adult kids floundering, etc. One of them has a trans son.
They didn’t give the news one second of their time. This is going to be bad, and I really get the impulse to take breaks from it — but that just can’t be the rule.
different-church-lady
@hitchhiker: They won’t give a shit until it disrupts their lives personally and directly.
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: I meant more in terms of gaining the trust of its neighbors again. If we go full Nazi, I’m not sure how we get back out from that.
But if the regime collapses, and we get back to something resembling sanity, we can regain whatever stature we lost given enough time of good behavior
Geminid
@Harrison Wesley: The U.S. has been striking ISIS and Al-Shabob in Somalia on and off in recent years. Like many conflicts this one gets little attention here.
Same with Syria. Our military mission and airstrikes against ISIS in eastern Syria don’t get much attention either, at least not in from US media. Middle East sites like Clash Reort and Levant24 cover these activities. A recent strike on an ISIS leader near Homs drew some wider attention mainly because of the location; Homs is in western Syria.
Baud
Where are the tariffs? Are they going to have a prime time event?
different-church-lady
@Baud: They’re in the room with us now.
Baud
@Geminid:
Yeah, but Biden didn’t try to look tough whenever we hit a terrorist cell. But Trump’s base eats it up, so there’s that.
David Collier-Brown
The U.S. already has the equivalent of the “Enabling Act of 1933. Once enacted, this law gave the German government the power to override individual rights prescribed by the constitution, and vested the Chancellor (Hitler) with emergency powers to pass and enforce laws without parliamentary oversight.” Mr Trump only needs to declare an emergency, or find a war to be in.
Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Last night, you asked what I meant about Alberta Health going full Covid CT, actually you asked what is Covid CT,
Covid CT is for example, masks don’t work, the Vaccines are dangerous, invectermin and colloidal silver are valid alt treatments, etc.
Kelly
@Miss Bianca: My sister had a job vaccinating poultry chicks way back in the 1980s. I don’t recall what disease they were preventing. Perhaps flu viruses mutate to quickly for the farmers to keep up?
Geminid
@Harrison Wesley: Under Biden, the Pentagon left these these anouncements to CENTCOM. They wanted to keep a low profile, especially in Syria where our soldiers operate in a complex (and dangerous) environment.
Trump and Hedgseth seem incapable of keeping a low profile on anything. They will exploit these activities for political purposes and that could drive the policy. A big mistake in my opinion.
@Geminid:
@Baud:
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jay:
I appreciate your answer. And I’m sorry for last night. I hope things get better for you
Harrison Wesley
@Geminid: AFAIK US troops have been in Syria for years with the same legal standing that Russian troops have in Ukraine. That is to say, none.
WTFGhost
@Raoul Paste: Trump wants tariffs, so there are tariffs. He *thinks* they will, among other things, bully other countries into subservience, but, he also thinks he’s, like, a really smart person, which just goes to show you, he’s dumb as a post and twice as hard-headed.
Geminid
@Harrison Wesley: Those troops certainly weren’t put in there with the permission of the Assad government. The Syrian government had lost control of most of the eastern half of Syria to ISIS by the time Obama sent them. That’s why he did, and why France and the UK pitched in. They still have small contingents there too.
That mission has pretty much outlived its purpose now, and I think it won’t there this time next year. Right now though, our main fighting partner, the Syrian Democratic Forces, is negotiating their status with the new Syrian government. We don’t want to pull the rug from under the SDF but we don’t want to encourage them to hold out for autonomy either, so it’s a tricky matter. That has to be resolved before we start drawing down our forces.
The Middle East Eye has good reporting on this. So does Levant24, and there are other good sites.
We still communicated and cooperated with the Assad regime and also the Russians while they were active in Syria. That was done through “deconfliction” mechanisms. Some was talking on the radio, and sometimes we conducted joint patrols along lines of separation. I read of patrols with five or even six different parties participating.
Deconfliction with Turkiye has been a very sensitive matter, since we back opposing militias; it’s been fairly successful despite diplomatic tension between the U.S. and Turkiye over Turkiye. This could be because our two militaries have a long history of working together. The officers on either side of the deconfliction communications probably knew each other from Nato exercises or from serving at the same Nato headquarters.
Turkiye acts in Syria through its M.I.T. intelligence agency. Hakan Fidan, who headed up M.I.T. from 2012 to 2023, served several years at Nato’s Rapid Reaction Force headquarters in the 1990s. Now Fidan is Erdogan’s trusted Foreign Minister and a key player in regional politics.
sab
We just bought an EV Honda Civic. We will be picking it up on Monday. We got in under the wire on tariffs. Hopefully we will still be eligible for the tax credit, but beating the tariffs was worth it.
We were planning to hang on to the other car for at least another five years. Who knows if we would even still be driving by then since we are old. But whatever. There are stepkids to think of.
I cannot believe how expensive cars have become.
EthylEster
It would be nice to see the entirety of the figure. Maybe then I could figure out its message.
sab
@RevRick: The thing I remember about McKinley is that he was assassinated. I am very much against presidential assassinations. Garfield would have been a great president. Lincoln was a great president.
WTFGhost
@Eolirin: But we refused to de-Nazify. Reconstruction was all about re-Nazi-fication, and there are too goddamned many Nazis.
(And, in Santa Clara, “… all the goddamn vampires.”)
The Lodger
different-church-lady: or until one or more of the Muskies uses their new fiscal super power to write themselves a huge obvious check. That might piss off a few normies.