Trump Tariffs are nuking Main Street
The price of Trump's tariffs will hit small businesses immediately and many won't survive for even a few weeks while he enjoys having his ass kissed.
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Let them eat hamburders
As soon as Donald Trump decided to destroy the global economy he hopped on his plane and flew down to Florida. He had to check in with his Saudi paymasters and play in a tournament at his own club. Incredibly he won!
How do I know…well…it’s all he cares about.
Hilarious.
So, while the stock market was collapsing, 401K’s melting away, and global scrambling to answer the outrageously stupid formula used to create this disaster, old Donald was scamming his way to yet another golf victory at his own club while pounding down McDonalds at the 19th hole.
The little people may suffer but its okay because he and his buddies all went long. The problem is that average people and small businesses don’t have that luxury. You see even as I write this the unimaginable impact of this vastly asinine trade war is coming home to small businesses across the country.
They simply won’t survive. What Trump and his idiot collaborators have done is essentially dropped a nuclear bomb on our small business community and I fear thousands simply will be vaporized.
They don’t care
Trump, Lutnick, and all the rest simply don’t care. We are expendable to the masters of the financial universe.
Treasury Secretary Bessent speaking with Maria Bartiromo just this morning. She asked him a simple question and framed it clearly. She read through how corporate America is all but stopping business. No capital investment. Cutting travel. Planning on staff cuts.
His answer is that they will have answers in months as they negotiate with individual countries one at a time in the coming weeks. That probably makes sense when you are talking about billion dollar corporations with liquidity to ride it out.
Now let’s take this entire scenario into the real world. You see in the real world this is going to destroy peoples lives right now. They don’t have weeks. They don’t have months. They have bills that cannot be paid right now and they can’t cut back costs here and there or do a stock split or some other corporate trick to stay afloat.
The wonder of it all is that somehow Fox News managed to frame it correctly just this morning as Steve Doocy of all people laid out a scenario from a friend that reached out to him. As you listen to him…do yourself a favor and watch the faces of the other propagandists. Brian Kilmeade on the left is in a full blown panic.
Doocy is desperately trying to delicately explain to their viewers that Trump and his collaborators are lying to the American people that the foriegn country pays the tariffs and it’s free month for the government. Carefully quoting from a New York Post story with caveats and hesitancy he tells about a small businessman who imports specialty toys from China and that his tariff bill in the past was around $26,000 a year and has now leaped to $346,000 overnight.
Meanwhile Democrats are portraying this as the “largest tax increase in history.” Which is also true to a certain extent. The increased prices on everyday items are staggering. We are being told that prices are going to skyrocket like this chart from American Progress lays out very clearly.
That’s bad. But almost all of those items are being offered by large corporations that have the cash on hand to pay the higher tariffs then pass it on to consumers. So, yes, average Americans are going to pay more for almost everything even if its made domestically as our own manufacturers raise their prices to make those sweet profits.
But no one seems to be paying attention to small business.
What about Main Street?
All of the conversations you’ve seen are about the big corporations and highly leveraged investors. We’ve talked about the impact on the stock market and Wall Street. No one is talking about Main Street.
Let’s circle back to Doocy’s story which is accurate and means simply that that business will very likely fail. The idea that a small business importing specialty toys with at best a 30% margin can suddenly just pay a $346,000 payment is ludicrous. Maybe they can take a loan but what bank is going to take that risk? With so little uncertainty at the top we have no idea if this trade war is permanent, a lark that goes away tomorrow, or something in between.
Why would a bank give a small business a loan for nearly half a million dollars and then Trump changes his broken brain tomorrow and the whole thing ends. Now you have businesses paying loans against money they will never make because the prices didn’t go up. They default in months.
We are constantly talking about how the “market doesn’t like uncertainty.” No shit! But imagine Main Street trying to navigate this moment. In that scenario someone sitting on at best $30,000 in liquid assets gets a bill for $346,000. They can’t pay it. They close their shop right now before their next payroll cycle or as soon as their existing inventory runs out.
Trust me, I know
You are going to see small businesses closing as early as this month. Period. How do I know? It happened to mine during the pandemic. I owned a small public relations firm focused on veterans and military families. We had a couple of rough years and I had taken loans to keep things going.
2020 opened on an very hopeful note. We were back in the black, picking up new clients, an incredibly high quality team in place and new opportunities on the horizon. Then there was a global pandemic.
We were highly leveraged with non-profit clients. Donations came to a screaming halt for them all. They immediately started canceling contracts and PR is always the first to go. We lost four clients the week the stock market crashed.
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No one was hiring public relations firms in those early months. For almost ten years the business cycle had always been when one client left, two more came in behind it.
I was able to cobble together a PPP loan and managed to make payroll and our loan payments for two months thanks to that helpful program. I was able to keep things going until July and then all the cash was gone. I gave my employees and clients 30-days notice that unless new business came in we were done.
Nothing came in, so I spent those weeks helping them all find other jobs and shuttered the business. I was fortunate that they all found work and I was able to connect with an old friend who brought me into the Lincoln Project as Senior Advisor for Veterans Affairs. It was like losing a child.
My daughter owns a small business now. She and her mother are combing through their stock and ingredients they use to make products to find out what will be blown up by these ridiculous tariffs. They’re not sure yet what the direct impact will be.
Many of their suppliers are reselling stock they import themselves. There is no guarantee those suppliers will survive long enough to raise prices and when they do it’s almost impossible to predict what the prices will be.
That’s what uncertainty on Main Street looks like and when that hits it turns once vibrant places into ghost towns. That’s what Donald Trump and the Masters of the Universe have done.
Take action now
At this point you know the drill. Start calling your member of Congress and the Senate. Shockingly it appears some of them actually do get it in the Republican Party. Rand Paul of all people has been loudly condemning these moves and Trump’s departure from the checks and balances.
They can’t keep burying their heads in the sand as the economy collapses. They cannot forgive that this was all based on the ideas of Peter Navarro who literally created a fake economist using an anagram of his own name, Ron Vara. No…I am not kidding. This is all based on lies.
The impact is coming and it will be much worse than a blip in your investment account.
After all….Trump is having the time of his life. He is getting the entire world to reach out to him. Just listen to him from last night.
Yeah. They are kissing his ass. It’s all just a joke the rats nest haired jackass.
Let’s get in the fight.
Just heard from my sister in Texas, a retired public school teacher. She has notified the local roofing contractor that she is canceling her plans for a new roof. She’s worried about spending that much money right now. That means one less job for the roofing company. The dominoes are starting to fall.
You are correct. Ask anybody who works as a materials buyer for a factory and they'll patiently explain to you who pays the tariffs when they order materials -- and it's NOT any government.