🧱

 Hmmmm….

As the Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. wrote, Sterling Heights, just north of Detroit, is an "auto-industry-dominated city" that could see massive numbers of jobs lost if the president makes good on his threats to Canada and Mexico.

According to Mayor Taylor, "We’re still scrambling to figure out what it all means," before adding, "If those tariffs go into effect as promised, it would be devastating," and labeling it as potentially, “the single-biggest threat to our local economy.”

According to the Post, "If Trump’s tariff threats materialize, this region of the country dominated by the domestic auto industry stands to take as big a hit as anywhere," with Wootson writing, "Billions of dollars in goods crisscross between Canada and the United States from points in Michigan, and economists and industry analysts warn that tariffs or, worse, an escalating trade war could kneecap the economy ofa region already battered by globalization and foreign competition."

Matt Ross, a finance professor at Western Michigan University, claimed there is good reason to fear a trade war over tariffs.

“It’s really hard to know how this will move through the economy,” he explained. "For a state that imports a lot to have a potential trade war on the horizon with its two closest partners … residents of Michigan should actually be perhaps a little bit terrified.” As for Mayor Taylor, he confessed, “I can understand that the southern border and immigration policy is a major part of Trump’s platform, and it’s something that I think a lot of Sterling Heights voters and citizens elected him to try to resolve in one way or the other. But at the cost that it will have for our local economy, I think it would just be staggering.”

Texas' largest single trading partner is Mexico. Tariffs would not just impact the border region; they would impact the entire state. Trump’s claim that tariffs would make America rich and virtually tax free, ignores the economic devastation that roiled the nation between 1870 and 1913, when a few got rich, and a majority couldn’t pay taxes (there was no income tax) because the economy couldn’t provide them with steady work. That period was marked by a series of economic crises we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.

And frankly, the inflation that put Trump back into office (because he promised to reverse it) was paltry compared to the inflation that started at the end of the ‘60’s, and ran into to double digit levels into the  ‘80’s. But the inflation we had most recently was bad enough to return Trump to office (anything but the status quo). The “pain” Trump promise is going to come down on his head like a ton of bricks.🧱 

The entire state of Texas is going to talk louder than Sterling Heights. This won’t be a small-town problem very long.