Tariffs and the Economy
Media Hit, 4/20/25 - Easter Edition
Happy Easter!
I’m headed on NewsMax’s Sunday Report in a little bit here, the topic is “tariffs.” Thankfully, I’ve written a few things on this already, so I’ll mostly be drawing on those items.
Talking Points
Popular support for tariffs continues to dwindle
See these images for a snippet
The result of all of this are tanking approval ratings for Trump across the board.
Even Republican Senators are starting to argue against tariffs and not just the quasi-libertarian Rand Paul, but Republican stalwarts like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell as well as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
We’re also starting to see the effects of the tariffs in the data, with the Philadelphia Fed’s manufacturing report last week being the first indictor that things are not going well.
The 90 day pause will delay or mute some of the negative reports that would almost certainly have come out this month from, e.g., the BLS but rest assured that they’re coming.
So What Happened?
I was once again joined by Hilary Fordwich. As always, she seems nice enough but good Lord is she frustrating. She just takes this shotgun approach of saying as many things as she can before she finishes talking, almost none of which are true, and then just staring smugly at the camera.
But it’s fine.
I stuck to my talking points from above and before. Namely, that what the U.S. is doing is pushing away trading partners and making China (of all places) seem like the stable economic superpower. If other countries have the choice, I wouldn’t be surprised if they chose China.
What I neglected to say, and wish I would have but will file away for future segments, was something to the effect of, “all the free trade deals in the world don’t mean anything if nobody wants to trade with you.” I do worry that we’re headed that way, which would be a shame and would take decades to recover from.