Liberation Tariffs – Reparations for Rural and Small Town America

 

During my lifetime I watched my former rural piece of heaven with its small town wither away. Kids had to pack up and leave after high school unless one might get lucky and snag a minimum wage job. Mom and Pop businesses such as textiles crashed with all the imports that arrived, and the couple of decent companies moved out to Mexico or some such country. They fell like dominoes.

I caught an obituary of a friend’s Mom in the local newspaper this week and it documented the decent businesses that folded one by one as she followed them as a worker one by one during her lifetime. From the ribbon factory ending with her last stand at the Seven Eleven.

How this Tariff thing will work out in the end only time will tell. One thing we do know, what we have isn’t working. I’d say this is the last stand. Even more importantly, do we really want to be dependent on feckless countries, many who mean us no good, on the stuff we need?

I hope more folks catch Trump’s roll out of his tariffs. Here is a part of the beginning.

“American steel workers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen,” Trump said from the White House Rose Garden Wednesday afternoon. “We have a lot of them here with us today. They really suffered, gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream. We had an American dream that you don’t hear so much about. You did four years ago, and you are now. But you don’t too often.”

“Now it’s our turn to prosper, and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt,” he said. “And it will all happen very quickly. With today’s action, we are finally going to be able to make America great again, greater than ever before or. Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country and you see it happening already. We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”

“For nations that treat us badly, we will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, non-monetary barriers and other forms of cheating. And because we are being very kind, we will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us. So the tariffs will be not a full reciprocal. I could have done that. Yes. But it would have been tough for a lot of countries,” he said.

“For decades, the United States slashed trade barriers on other countries, while those nations placed massive tariffs on our products and created outrageous non-monetary barriers to decimate our industries,” Trump said. “And in many cases, the non-monetary barriers were worse than the monetary ones. They manipulated their currencies, subsidized their exports, stole our intellectual property, imposed exorbitant taxes to disadvantage our products, adopted unfair rules and technical standards, and created filthy pollution havens.”

“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. And the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been,” he said. “So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”

More here with a list of the tariffs. Source

And with that we need to pack up and leave Europe. Wait until they have to pay for their own military and see how that goes.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that US actions would deal a blow to the global economy and urged further trade negotiations. Trump had announced a 20% tariff on EU imports, which will take effect April 9.

 

 

This vote of foolishness by the Rino’s of a meaningless vote since I understand the tariffs have already been lifted.  Good work folks. You couldn’t wait one day for this to shake out? You sure can wait on every other bill. It wasn’t going to go anywhere with the House not taking it up. Just as the headline reads:

BREAKING: Senate Votes to Sabotage President Trump’s Canadian Tariff Policy With Four Republicans Casting the Decisive Yes Votes

A handful of Senate Republicans joined Democrats to vote last evening on legislation rescinding tariffs on Canadian goods, a startling rebuke of President Trump.

The final vote was 51-48. Here are the four Republicans who handed the Democrats an undeserved victory and snubbed the President:

Susan Collins of Maine

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky

Lisa Murkowski of Alaska

Rand Paul of Kentucky

As Fox News previously reported, leftist Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) sponsored a joint resolution that would terminate the national emergency Trump declared regarding illicit drugs and Canada. Trump has argued that tariffs are necessary to curb the drug flow and rebalance the unfair trading relationship between the two countries. Read more

 

The best of the swamp.

Source: https://bunkerville.wordpress.com/2025/04/03/liberation-tariffs-reparations-for-rural-and-small-town-america/