Stay the course on tariffs

The Donald is saving us from imports and the federal government.

Billionaire Bill Ackman’s feet got cold over tariffs. He’s calling for a 90-day delay on imposing tariffs on the world because the Dow fell precipitously. He wants to avoid Trump taking the blame for a global economic meltdown.

He tweeted late Sunday, “Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe. The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president—in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress—are going to be severely negative. This is not what we voted for.

“The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system.

“Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down.

“May cooler heads prevail.”

I don’t know about that. Countries are lining up trying to cut a deal on tariffs. The only people challenging Trump today are on cable TV.

The collapse of American manufacturing threatens the world. What FDR called the arsenal of democracy is now a rust belt papered over with fiat money out of the federal printing presses.

The politicians in the United States—including Trump—learned in 2008 that the way to keep Wall Street happy was to open the Fed and print money.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke refused to bail out Lehman Brothers, which collapsed and took with it the life savings of many customers. The market went into a meltdown and Paulson and Bernanke had to bail everyone out.

After that, the national debt soared from just under $12 trillion in 2009, when Obama took over, to just over $36 trillion when Trump returned.

Bush 43 was just as bad as he took over a $5.8 trillion and doubled it in 8 years. Bill Clinton was downright thrifty by comparison having borrowed only $1.4 trillion

But all that matters to politicians in the 21st century is the Dow, the Dow, the du-du-Dow. It tripled as the federal financial hole tripled in size.

In his first term, Donald Trump fell for it. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 18,332.74 on the day we elected Trump president. It closed at 27,479.41 on the day the CIA dis-elected him. It closed at 38,314.86 on Friday, despite a pandemic panic in 2020 and four years of management by a corrupt marionette.

Taxes and competence in the White House don’t matter. The national debt is fueling it all.

Wall Street is no brighter than Washington than Moscow is. Remember the Dotcom bubble? Remember, Lehman Brothers was of Wall Street, not Congress.

Trump has learned a lot from his first presidency. The 2020 steal by FJB was a blessing in disguise because that injustice gave Trump four years to review his first presidency. He has a loyal Cabinet now, a friendlier Congress and a focus on the Forgotten Man, not the stock market.

He will do what Harding did but without having a mistress. Trump learned that with Ivana. Or he should have. Chasing tail at 78 comes with one yuge problem: what do you do when you catch one?

Harding inherited a financial mess from Woody Wilson. Harding cut spending and triggered the Roaring Twenties. Coolidge gets the credit because Democrats smeared Harding with the Teapot Dome scandal. He died before he could defend himself.

Trump could defend himself and he did. We re-elected him because the public didn’t buy the Democrat-generated nonsense about stealing nuclear codes and the like. Also, the CIA missed on July 13. He is now free to turn around the country.

The first thing he did was go after the corruption. He’s Batman. Elon Musk is Robin getting all the attention in his red and yellow outfit. That’s a distraction. The Dark Knight is defunding the Democrat Party’s NGOs by shutting down US AID and other federal ATMs.

A good example is Trump killing the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That sounds terrible until you realize that it funds the American Library Association. The ALA succeeded in stopping the installation of child-proof access to the Internet.

But the big one was legitimizing Gender Queer, a graphic novel that is kiddie porn that depicts children having sex. Its author and publisher should be in prison. Instead, ALA gave it a book of the year award, which is why it is in elementary schools.

That helped trigger the fad of schoolchildren declaring themselves to be of the opposite sex. When we were kids, we had Hula Hoops. Today’s kids get puberty blockers.

The reaction to the closing of this ATM was as expected. USA Today declared, “Libraries are under siege: How Trump’s cuts put community hubs in peril.”

Hubs? Most days, the only car parked at the Poca Library is the librarian’s. I am not against libraries. I am against politicizing them.

But reducing the government, ending DEI and scrapping gifts to the NGOs are just three little steps in saving the economy. A smaller deficit helps but we must increase revenues as well. He is using tariffs as behavior modification for both foreign governments as well as manufacturers.

Canada and the rest are going to have to open their markets to the USA. And car companies and others are going to have to Be American, Build American. Toyota and many other foreign car companies have moved plants here. For now, I don’t care who owns the companies. This is about jobs.

Ackman supported Trump last week and reposted a series of tweets by Tanvi Ratna, an expert on digital currency.

She said, “Trump’s new tariffs aren’t a trade tweak—they’re the first move in a full-spectrum reset. $9.2T in debt matures in 2025. Inflation lingers. Alliances are shifting.

“One announcement just set a dozen wheels in motion. Here’s what’s really happening—and why it matters. Start with the debt: $9.2T must be refinanced in 2025.”

Hold that thought for a moment. She said for every 1 basis point in the interest, the USA saves a billion bucks.

The Financial Times reported, “A flight to quality has pushed yields on 10-year Treasuries below 4% for the first time since Donald Trump won last year’s election, as investors look for havens from the market turmoil triggered by the US president’s tariff increases.

“Ten-year US Treasury yields have fallen more than 0.36 percentage points to 3.88% on Friday as the price of the debt has surged, putting them on track for their best week since August.”

Using Tavna’s math, that 36 basis point drop is $36 billion saved. Not bad.

Back to Tavna, who said, “But cheap refinancing isn’t enough on its own. Even at lower rates, the debt remains enormous. That’s where the next lever comes in: cutting the deficit.

“Elon Musk & DOGE are cutting $4B per day. At that pace, they’d shave off $1 trillion by end of Sept. 25 (if not May).

“With these savings, the big economic pillar to successfully deliver on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's 3-3-3 plan is to get growth UP.

“Tariffs come in as a trigger for domestic industrial revival. The thinking is: by making imports expensive, you create room for U.S. producers to step in.

“But here’s the problem: American factories can’t scale up overnight. So in the short term, consumers will face higher prices.

“The administration knows this. That’s why they’re front-loading the pain now, betting that by 2026, the benefits will be visible.”

Already car companies are shuttering parts plants in Canada and Mexico. The UAW, which represents many of those workers, supports Trump despite the union’s Orange Man Bad attitude toward everything else he does. Ford already is cutting prices to expand its market share.

It’s pretty wild. It gets better.

Ryan Dezember of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal wrote, “Capital Economics estimated that the import taxes outlined by President Trump Wednesday afternoon are likely to annually generate about that much in customs duties.

“The tariffs will raise a maximum of $835 billion, the firm's economists calculate. But ‘assuming such high tariffs lead to a marked decline in imports, the increase in revenues will probably end up closer to $700 billion,’ they wrote in a note to clients. That is equivalent to 2.3% of the country's gross domestic product, they wrote.”

I am ambivalent about the WSJ calling tariffs import taxes. On the one hand, it gets the word taxes in there, which globalists want people to see but on the other hand, it shows what is taxed: imports. You can avoid the tax if you would just Be American, Buy American.

The problem with that is there are so many things we no longer make.

To ease the pain, Musk is pushing to send checks for $2,000 each to every TAXPAYING American as their share of the DOGE savings. I would cut those checks on Black Friday so we can have a Holly Jolly Christmas.

As readers know, my philosophy is if I can see it from my living room in Poca, West Virginia, then they can see it in Washington. In this case, they can see it in Davos, Switzerland. (There’s a Davis, West Virginia. I don’t want to confuse anyone.)

The globalists must be scared. We have our first bear market since covid.

As the stock market tanked last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Tucker Carlson, “The distribution of equities across households: the top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities—88% of the stock market.

“The next 40% owns 12% of the stock market.

“The bottom 50% has debt.

“They have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans, and we've got to give them some relief.”

He also said, “The bottom 50% of working Americans have gotten killed. We are trying to address that. We’re trying to get rates down. And could we be seeing that this economy, that we inherited, starting to roll a bit? Sure. And there’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

America needs jobs. Tariffs will help bring them home. Tariffs are negotiable and Trump knows the art of the deal.

Ackman tweeted, “Trump’s negotiating style is to ask for the moon and then settle somewhere in between. It has worked well for him in the past so he is using the same approach here.

“The market’s response is due to the fear that if this strategy fails and the tariffs stay in place, they will plunge our economy into a recession. And we don’t need to wait for failure as it doesn’t take long for a high degree of uncertainty to cause economic activity to slow.”

That was on Friday. Something happened over the weekend to worry Ackman.

Maybe Trump signaled he’s going to back away because so many heads of state are trying to get him to make a deal. They will settle for stealing millions from us instead of billions under the guise of free trade.

Maybe all those Hands Off protests for more government regulations and illegal aliens worked.

But Ackman has cold feet.

I don’t. I wear socks. I suggest he get a pair because the Lord did not spare Donald Trump to have him fail as president.

By the way, EF Hutton married Marjorie Merriweather Post, who ran Postum. They acquired Birdseye and other food companies, changing the name to General Foods in 1929. She had Mar-a-Lago built and willed it upon death to the USA to become the president’s winter home. Carter didn’t want it. Reagan sold it to some guy in New York for $5 million. I wonder whatever happened to him.