Apr 9, 2025
You wanted a Tariff Rant? You got it.
Loading...
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Türkiye
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
You wanted a Tariff Rant? You got it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
President Donald Trump was elected on a promise to revitalize America’s heartland by reviving the manufacturing industry, which has no doubt
"Has U.S. domestic steel production actually increased because of the Trump administration’s tariffs on imports? Barely. In 2025, American steel production rose by just 3%. Worse still, the Tax Foundation estimates that 104,000 U.S. jobs have been lost in relation to Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics has found that every steel job “saved” by the Trump administration’s policies has cost U.S. taxpayers $650,000. It’s unlikely that voters who backed tariffs envisioned subsidized jobs as costly as the salaries of Wall Street executives or big-city lawyers.
The math is brutal — tariffs protect one steelworker for every 80 jobs that depend on affordable steel inputs — such as the automotive, rail, and housing sectors. On the consumer side, Canadian jet ski manufacturer BRP Inc. has cut $353 million from its 2027 balance sheet projections due to the tariffs. Summer adventurers looking to buy or rent a Sea-Doo for the lake will inevitably pay more. The same goes for food that requires a tin can, squeezing domestic suppliers and, perversely, benefiting foreign producers of canned food.
All of this makes Washington’s focus on production rather illogical. Slivers of good news for domestic producers of steel, aluminum, and copper can be devastating for other sectors and consumers.
Affordability is a tricky issue and continues to dominate voters’ concerns heading into the midterm season. The administration seems stuck between its populist promises to revive certain jobs and the reality that this means higher prices on everything from homes to a new tractor. MAGA influencer Benny Johnson put it this way: “Losing money means nothing. Digital ones and zeroes. In the end, you won’t miss any of it. Losing your country costs you everything.”
This is the definition of a losing message. It’s also an economically illiterate one. A 50% tariff is a 50% de facto tax on the raw materials U.S. manufacturers need to supply what consumers demand."
"Pox Americana" – surprised I hadn't heard that before. But it's an accurate way to refer to the Trump administration.
In case you haven't heard: Tariffs Are Taxes. And Donald Trump just imposed the biggest tax hike in US history.
Disagreement over tariffs has opened the first tiny crack in the GOP Senate since Trump took office. Enough Republicans temporarily left the cult to keep Trump from imposing additional tariffs on Canada.
Though most Republicans on Capitol Hill are still going along with Trump's tax hike on consumers. Lawrence O'Donnell provides some history on Republicans and taxes.
Free Trade Is For Peasants, Not Cartoonists
Transcript, discussion, and a gross anecdote about Hugh Hefner at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/free-trade-is-98677035
We can keep making these cartoons because lots of people support us with $1-3 pledges! Join them at patreon.com/barry
From Henry George: "What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” Is this sentiment incorrect considering for example infant industry, US industrialization under protectionism etc?
Like a lot of 19th century heterodox reformers like the Greenback Party or the Populists, Henry George was rather hostile to the conservative turn that Republican economic policy had taken in the post-war years.
Thus, for example Henry George and people like him were advocates of Greenbackism as opposed to the Republican gold standard orthodoxy, because they viewed deflation as a major cause of the suffering of the laboring classes both in the farms and factories.
And yes, they tended to be hostile to protectionism, generally from the perspective that tariffs were regressive forms of taxation, and that the supposed benefits that were supposed to come from protectionism weren't trickling down to the workers. Yes, American industry was growing by leaps and bounds in this period, but the gains were largely flowing to the robber barons.
(Thus, one of the things Henry George hoped to do with his "single tax" was the reduction of tariff rates in order to lower prices and boost the real incomes of working people.)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Article from the London School of Economics about the effect of Napoleon’s protectionism (Continental System)
Can temporary protection from trade with advanced economies foster the development of ‘infant industries’ in developing countries? Reka Juha
Really fascinating excerpt:
“On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, there were only 900 spinning jennies in France, while Britain boasted 18,000.
During the 10 year period of the blockade, cotton production capacity in the new technology quadrupled in France. But development was regionally uneven (see Figure 2). Consistent with increased protection in northern regions of the French Empire, spinning capacity in those regions increased enormously, while firms in areas around the Spanish border went bankrupt.”
The article explains how the northern ports of Europe were the ones that most complied with the continental blockade, whereas the blockade was not successful in Spain due to the Spanish insurgency against Napoleonic rule, which is why their firms went bankrupt.
The author also says that there was enduring impact of the blockade decades later:
“As late as 1850, more than three decades after the end of Napoleonic rule, Belgium and France, two areas of the empire that enjoyed high levels of protection from British trade, had larger cotton industries than other European countries. Most strikingly, the domestic cotton industry was generally small in countries that had been exposed to higher levels of British competition throughout the blockade.”
Between the 1860s and the 1930s, the United States was the most heavily protected economy in the world. The model worked marvellously well, and the US quickly became the world’s dominant industrial power. Britain, for its part, had to compensate for its loss of the American market by pushing free trade elsewhere in the world, forcing it onto China through the Opium Wars and on their colonies in South Asia and Africa by executive fiat. The global South lost their economic independence because the Americans had gained it. Meanwhile, every other Western country followed the American System, as it was called by that time, line by line. During the first decades of the 20th century, protectionism was the norm across the industrialised world.
Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.
— Confucius