Trump
As of this writing, it has been 17 days since former President Donald Trump has occupied the White
House, and the Republic still stands.
Trump has not been idle in office. He is practicing, in the
postmodern era, what Alexander Hamilton referred to in Federalist No. 70,
titled "The Executive Department Further Considered", as “energy and
unity in the executive.” Some would say the executive office has been on high
boil since Trump had been sworn in as president, and the steaming bubbles are
giving the immovable opposition – Hollywood elites, academic eggheads and
aroused neo-progressive Democrat politicians, major agita.
Leader of the US Senate Chuck Schumer appeared on television
the other night to protest a possible trade war with Mexico and Canada holding
in one hand an avocado and a can of beer to make some point about tariffs that
quickly flew over the heads of the American public.
"It’s going to affect beer, OK," said Schumer, displaying
a tall can of Corona Extra. "Most of it, Corona here, comes from Mexico.
It’s going to affect your guac – because what is guacamole made of? Avocados.
If you have pizza, it's going to affect the cost of cheese.”
Trump, so far, has used the threat of tariffs to persuade
outgoing Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau to beef up security at our
northern border. After some political
posturing, the outgoing Trudeau caved. Newly elected President of Mexico Claudia
Sheinbaum quickly followed suit. The U.S. southern border that under former
President Joe Biden’s administration had allowed massive numbers of unvetted
citizens of foreign countries to attain illegal entry is now, for all practical
purposes, closed.
The Western Journal recently
reported that record high border crossings “at the end of 2023 included over 4,000
illegal crossings in the Del Rio sector of Texas alone. Of the 582 overall
illegal crossings on [a recent] Sunday, there were only 60 illegal crossings in
the Del Rio sector… From December 2023 to the present, illegal crossings,
therefore, dropped 95 percent, and we are only a week into the Trump
presidency.”
Tariffs judiciously used – for instance, to redress a
politically induced imbalance in trade – are useful, but it is doubtful that
tariffs may replace the income tax.
It has been amusing to watch neo-progressives, borrowing
pages from the conservative playbook, argue 1) that a tariff is a consumer tax,
2) that American consumers pay for tariffs, and 3) that this political
imposture is designed to draw criticism away from politicians, responsible for
the hidden tax, and fasten attention somewhere else – anywhere else. Incidentally,
a tariff placed on consumer products shipped from, say, China – notorious for
underpricing products to drive competitors from an economic marketplace – would
be paid by American consumers only if they could not obtain the
product elsewhere at a lower cost.
Rarely have neo-progressive Democrats inveighed against business
taxes and, when they do so, their efforts are designed to shift the burden of
taxation from middle class workers to redundantly rich millionaires, but not nouveau riche money grabbers such as the
Bidens. We all know that business taxes are collected by businesses and passed
along to a grasping government, which then disperses the swag in ways that
benefit party interests . Businesses, in other words do not pay taxes; they are
tax collectors
who pass along taxes as well as tax increases to consumers of goods and
services in the form of higher prices.
However, the very same people who favor high business taxes,
mostly neo-progressives, we now find heatedly objecting to tariffs on the
grounds that such taxes punish consumers of goods and services, different in shape
and texture but not in kind or principle from business taxes.
The truth is: Neo-progressive politicians are not interested
in cutting expenditures and passing the savings along to middle class workers
in the form of tax reductions that inconvenience them. That is to say, they are
not interested in uplifting the middle class by allowing taxpayers to keep a
bit more of the riches they have earned through the sweat of their brows. This
venture would adjust the growth of a ravenous government that, in the past 50
years in Connecticut, has reduced inner cities to penury, shown nearly criminal
indifference to the unchecked expansion of a cloying administrative apparatus
at all governmental levels – federal, state, and municipal – and has shown
itself to be far more greedy than Mr. Scrooge himself in his most merciful
moments.
The spend and tax imperative throughout history has been
irresistible for anti-democratic authoritarian regimes, and that is why –
sometimes much too late – such regimes have a relatively short shelf life.
Eventually, people catch on and realize that such governments are related to the
people they govern inversely: the richer the government, the poorer the people.
In a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” Lincoln’s
words, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people
some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
The question now set before every American taxpayer is: Do
you want to be richer, or do you want your government, already swimming in
politically generated inflated dollars, to be richer?
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