To Tariff, or Not to Tariff? Let's go with "not."
U.S. protectionist practices are poorly understood, and as Americans fail to take even simple steps to apply pressure on the Trump administration, economic instability looms with disastrous potential.
Spraytan Sauron has gone and done it: Yesterday he ordered 25% tariffs to go into effect against goods imported from Canada and Mexico. He imposed an additional 10% tariff on goods from China, on top of the 25% tariffs already in place. The market loved it so much today, it was on day two of decline on all major indices.
From the White House fact sheet, the administration claimed that between Canada and Mexico,
“Last fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 21,000 pounds of fentanyl at our borders, enough to kill more than [my emphasis] 4 billion people.”
Good round number, but Adam Smith’s classic economic theory appears to challenge this, as the United States only has 335 million inhabitants. What were they going to do with the rest of the 4 billion? Save it for later?
Let’s take a closer look at the actual data about fentanyl seized at the Canadian border: In the 2024 fiscal year, a jaw-dropping 41 pounds of the stuff was seized by all agencies tasked with apprehending the stuff. Let that sink in for a minute.
Forty-one pounds.
That means we’d better be looking for a small sedan crossing over somewhere on the 5,525 miles that make up our neighbor’s border to the north.
They claim on the White House website there are 4 billion lethal doses of the stuff inside those ~21,000 pounds. I’m not a chemist, pharmacist, or an illegal drug expert, so I’ll have to take them at their word.
You must remind yourself to breathe again when confronted with the fact that we import almost $412 billion annually from Canada. Let me see… if we do some associative math, that’s (clicking on calculator noises) $10,065,853,658 per pound of fentanyl that was seized. Now that’s a hefty price tag for the folks who mostly leave us alone and that we generally appreciate up north.
Really? Do they write this kind of nonsense down in executive notices? Yes they sure do. They also look at the camera with a straight face while they torch our closest and only neighbor to the north with punitive trade tariffs. It’s an unprovoked trade war, indiscriminately targeted at arguably our greatest ally in the western hemisphere.
I’d like to take a crack at a revised version. Hmm. Let’s see.
… does that cover reality a bit more fairly? I think so.
But then there’s the southern border, and we all know how rivers of fentanyl pour in from there. That river adds up to about 21,100 pounds in 2024. That’s based on $505.9 billion worth of imports from Mexico. (Same calculator noises clicking). Wow, that works out to $23,976,303 per pound. Twenty three point nine million dollars. 57,997 deaths from 8/23-9/24.
I feel the need to be very clear about one thing: I take drug use, drug addiction, and fentanyl use very seriously as a recovering addict. There’s nothing funny or glib about it to the people who’ve lost loved ones because of overdoses or violence that usually comes with addiction. So please, understand my beef with Trump isn’t about bringing attention to fentanyl abuse and trying to stop it. But it sure is like hearing about a problem, listening to all the wrong people telling you what to do about it, and then doing what they say. More akin to breaking a toe with a hammer for a toothache than any attempt at a real cure for the problem.
So let’s look at those imports again:
Mind you, we went to great lengths over more than a decade in Trump’s first term to craft a trade deal out that made sense and which everyone gave a little to get a lot back. It was far from perfect. But today, we’ve witnessed a colossally stupid move that even the most dumb-of-the-bunch monkeys in a zoo could point at and sign language a “what the hell?” back.
Fentanyl must really be killing people off in the United States. Let’s check in with the CDC for the most recent data I can find:
… so we’re talking about something killing people at a rate just above the flu and pneumonia. Let’s get RFK Jr. on that right away, so he can make sure we get Ebola, a little bit of Taenia Solium (brain worm), and some unnecessary measles on that top-ten list and keep Fentanyl off it. We don’t want more people dying from Fentanyl poisoning than Ebola or measles.
In a section of the Executive memo boldly titled “BUILDING ON PAST SUCCESS,” Trump states: “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” We’ll know it when we see Canadians come charging over the border from Alberta into Montana with a white flag and a signed promise to… but wait, they’ll be captured by those border patrol guys first, so we’ll never know when it’s time to let them off the hook. Maybe Dear Leader’s plan is to just keep tabs on things until he feels like the Canadians have endured enough retribution from him.
Meanwhile, we’d like to send a brief recap of today’s market performance since these damn tariffs went into effect. We sure hope Donnie sees the problem:
Since the markets closed on the first day after the tariffs went into effect, I’ll stop discussing this topic for now.
The Flaw in MAGA is The Last Word
I’ll close today with something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. A huge following coalesced around Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again.” To which many have asked, “which period of greatness is he referring to?” Some have settled on the postwar 1950s because it was then when economic and social balance could be perceived as settled for a time.
But that theory doesn’t hold water, not even for a minute. To the blacks in the south, the 1950s was a time of terror. The rise of the KKK brought out the worst in white males (I refuse to call them men, as they were not qualified to call themselves human for their unrepentant, horrible sins). Civil rights were beginning to be discussed as a possible future, and even then it was only in its infancy.
The woman’s plight at this time was also a case study of confinement and misguided normalization of specific expectations. She was to be the housewife, even though it was through her tireless work that she helped American industry win the war, working in its factories. She was expected to be a mother, foregoing her potential brilliance in one or more areas if she were only to be more educated, in lieu of caring for babies, children, adolescents, and teenagers. Only after her decades of unpaid (and often under-appreciated) labor in the home were done with children could she even dream of entering the workforce, at which point, it didn’t present itself as a compelling option.
She was also to be a wife. Sexual gratification from her partner was subordinated to his. Her friend’s main topic of conversation was often boring narratives of life in the home. If she was miserable, the source of that misery was not external to hers – it was her “hysteria” or “emotional state.”
It seems then, that the 1950’s “Make America Great Again” theory is full of holes.
It is more likely that men, in the way they can miss childhood comforts, fail to reach balance with the comforts of modern-day life. I’ve verified this anecdotally to make sure it is not unique to my generation that men still often “marry their mothers.” Of course, not in the literal sense; in the sense that they look to their wives as their therapist, their enforcer of household rules, and their punching bag both psychologically and often tragically, physically.
So, the root of the problem MAGA loyalists face is much simpler than identifying a specific time and place when America was, in fact, great. I want to say this loud and proud so nobody misses it:
It is the inherent impossibility of fulfilling the impossible: restoring that which is irrevocably lost and gone, which can not possibly be restored by any means to mankind.
It is right there that MAGA has fallen apart and always will. Because it is impossible to achieve, because no one has ever gone back in time even a millisecond, men have created a dysfunctional allegiance to the unattainable.
Perhaps that is in part why it is so difficult for those not in the Trump Cult of Personalities to dislodge themselves from MAGA. They are convinced that their lust for the past can be satiated if they can remember it and read about it. It can’t, and it never will.
And Don’t Forget Donnie’s Speech
When Trump speaks to Congress tonight, watch the Senators and Representatives audience. Take a quick survey of their skin color and age. Ask yourself, “how many of these who are complicit in Trump’s aggressive destruction of federal government – Republicans and Democrats – are men? How many are old enough to know of this Pollyanna-level illusion of a better past? How many are all too willing to allow the risk of destruction of everything we have worked hard as a country to build over the last 250 years?”
Each and every one of those who have participated in the downfall of the Rule of Law, the destruction of freedoms, and the elimination of economic sanity from our thinking, must be held to account. Remember who they are. They are counting on you to forget.
Rick Herbst
March 4th 2025
SOURCES
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-canada-fentanyl-trafficking/
https://usatrade.census.gov/index.php
https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/early-brief/?utm_campaign=wp_power_up
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/fastfacts.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/did-a-tapeworm-really-eat-part-of-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-brain
Thank you!
great article. I watched the speech and it was exhausting. Sooooo many lies.