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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?
