Compared to Canadians, Poles are the same as Russians.
Did you ever have a hippopotamus for lunch? Now you can with Libby’s Zoodles. Elephants! Tigers! Zebras! Giraffes!
White House Narrows April 2 Tariffs
I think Trump will go back and forth trying to find a tariff formula that harms the Canadian economy more than it hurts U.S. stock market indexes.
The fact that he doesn’t understand tariffs and clearly doesn’t want to understand them means he’s basically flailing around trying to get the magic to work like he wants it to.
People should be paying attention to US aggression against Greenland. It’s the first target, and they are ramping up the rhetoric. Invasion is way, way above 50% likely with regards to Greenland, folks. And you’re really not paying attention if you think a country run by a fascist, with decreasingly effective checks on his power and slavish loyalists in every major role, is going to stop there or isn’t serious about the other countries they’re threatening.
In general, it’s hard to know what Trump really wants, or if he even actually wants anything or is just stringing together things that buy influence, without consideration of a larger objective, to achieve adulation.
But, one very real possibility is that he’s trying to replace income tax with consumption tax, via tariffs. Cites: 1, 2, and 3
With that target in mind, there’s never an end of tariffs on Canada. They would just be raised and lowered to achieve some form of Federal budgeting (that would, presumably, care about balancing the budget as strongly as it does today). Or, at least, not until Congress decided to undo everything that Trump did (i.e. to undo the damage and try to scrape back all the lost business we’d inflicted on ourselves).
Well, maybe when federal revenues collapse entirely. They cannot replace income tax revenues with tariffs. It’s completely impossible. There is no tariff rate at which you could come anywhere close to doing that, since the higher the rate, the more imports drop. The US imports about $3-$3.5 billion a year; a 25% tariff wouldn’t even raise half the money personal income tax does, and that’s assuming imports wouldn’t drop, which they would. If you raise tariffs higher imports drop faster and you’re harming the economy more, thereby dropping revenues more.
You could replace them with internal sales taxes and VATs and such, sure. It’s not a very good idea, and I don’t think the Republican Party could ever politically survive even trying to create a national sales tax right now high enough to replace income tax entirely, because the rate would be HUGE. Canada’s GST raises about one ninth of federal government revenue at 5%. Personal income tax is half of US government revenue - I’m doing back of the envelope math here but we’d be talking about a sales tax rate of at least 20-25%. That would be immensely unpopular even if you killed off income taxes, and it would be very regressive.
- If the basis of determination for what someone would or wouldn’t do could be limited to things that were sane, made sense, and were functionally do-able, we’d be living in a much different world than the one that we actually do live in. Saying that they won’t do it, because it would be dumb and fail, doesn’t mean much when the head of the FBI has a top priority of teaching agents to wrestle good and the head of the CIA is worried about UFOs.
- And if you did ask them, they’d just point to Musk and his job to gut the Federal government. If you ban the standing army and cut 50% of Medicaid recipients, you start getting into the zone of possibility.
- Political survival matters when there are free and fair elections. The current Presidential office holder is talking about a 3rd term, despite that being unconstitutional and abhorrent to our history (/spit on FDR) and is partly famous for trying to create unconstitutional, criminal electors who would claim that they’d voted for him, not the other guy, and then championed an invasion of Congress and threats to murder the Vice President, so he’d accept the legitimacy of the false electors. (And, somehow, 40-50% of the electorate didn’t care much about most of that strongly enough to protect our legal system.)
And then there was this news:
According to aviation analytics provider OAG, forward bookings from Canada to the U.S. have fallen by more than 70 percent for every month through to the end of September compared to the same period last year. April has seen the steepest drop, with just 296,000 bookings, down 76 percent from 1.3 million.
But I’m sure the US will (think it will) be fine without us.
My predictions:
-
The US is heading for a recession for multiple reasons, tariffs being a big one, and
-
The Orange Buffoon will blame Canada for the consequences of his own incompetence – consequences that economists are already on record as predicting. He might also blame Europe. Or he might blame a Canada-Europe conspiracy, which he’s already hinted at. He certainly won’t blame himself!
ETA: I suspect in light of the travel guidance being issued by many European countries, flight bookings from Europe to the US are probably also way down. No one wants to be arrested, interrogated, detained, and then deported.
I feel like this is the personal level version of that “Oh, the US isn’t likely to actually invade Canada” argument.
Sure, okay, maybe there’s only a 1% chance that you might have a problem with crossing the border. But why even take that 1% chance, if you don’t have to, and if, when it happens, it destroys your entire life? You decide your bets not just on what the odds are, but what you risk losing vs winning. The potential losses are just too devastating, it’s not worth a vacation in Florida.
DeSantis derogatorily dismissed three million Canadian tourists who visit Florida each year and often own property. The many people who rely on tourism are far less sanguine. Making them register is foolish.
DeSantis is a Trumpist, and must parrot the party line.
My mother is heading back to Toronto on Thursday and the uncertainty with her friends down there is a real thing. People don’t know if they are going to return next year, sell their condos, or what.
My mother is in her late 80s, so going somewhere else is not an easy change but I can see younger seniors choosing Mexico or even someplace like Spain or Portugal for their snowbirding.
It’s a well-established business in Spain - keeps the tourist businesses running through their winter.
My inlaws own a rental house on a US island near Vancouver, BC. They normally have summer booked by now but that is far from true this year. They also had several cancellations. I’m guessing the majority of the cancellations and missing are from BC, but I expect even US folks are not committing as much “fun money” right now.
Bellingham might be pleasant to visit this summer without all those darn Canadians and vacationers! I’m only half kidding. B’ham is getting too busy for my liking.
My best friend since uni and long time snow bird not only will not be going next year but said he feels afraid. Belize looks good.
Driving home next week and happy to be.
iTake off, you hoser!’
I don’t keep up with this thread because there are too many others to keep up with, but this seems the place to post this:
It’s a ‘substack’ article (I don’t even know what a substack is), but it’s more entertainingly written than other sources.
Basically,
Trump, of course, is ALL-CAPS LIVID.
Some of the claims seem exaggerated, and some of the evidence is chronologically mis-ordered, but it was a strong statement by Carney and those are the implications.
How shall such “sanctions” be enforced?
Currently, sanctions work because a lot of countries in the world used to agree with the US, so if the US said, “Let’s not play nice with Iran!”, we went along with the plan.
But who will agree with these new sanctions on Canada and the EU? Who will voluntarily withdrawn from trade with us, just because they are asked to?
This is the loss of soft power that Trump’s War on Everyone has cost the US, and it’s the kind of soft power that Trump and his ilk have never understood, and have actively hated.
Is Trump going to order the Navy to blockade our ports? If not, good luck with your “sanctions”, you Fat Faced Fuck.