CSotD: Looks like it’s US against the World
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Somehow Captain America looks kind of ridiculous in Andy Bundy’s cover illustration for Realpolitik, though I can’t find that the magazine has any on-line presence. But he adds the slug
“Captain America-First” unleashes tariffs against China but also Canada and Mexico, bullying his allies and neighbours while turning away from many of the real threats to global stability.
Which sounds more like contempt than fear.
Peter Brookes’ intentions are clear, and if the world’s reaction hasn’t yet bashed Dear Leader in the chops, there’s enough contempt in the international cartooning community to suggest his bold move isn’t going to turn out as he had hoped.
A third British cartoonist, Patrick Blower, adds the UK to Trump’s announced targets, suggesting that Keir Starmer would do well not to rely on the US giving his country a break.
There’s also a suggestion along the lines of “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
I saw a remark on social media that Trump’s tariffs on Mexico would drive it into the arms of BRIC, though I don’t take that possibility too seriously. Yet.
But certainly Trump’s cutting off of all foreign aid opens the door for China to provide the sorts of assistance that a healthier Soviet Union deployed a generation ago. The poster child for that came when the Western powers withdrew support for Egypt’s Aswan Dam and the USSR stepped in, cementing a friendship between Nasser and the Russians.
I’ve always thought we’d make more friends by digging wells than by digging foxholes, but I guess that’s why I’ve never been in government.
Jordanian cartoonist Osama Hajjaj depicts Trump as a classroom goof-off, to which I’d add somewhat parenthetically that there’s got to be a reason Trump threatened to sue any schools that released his grades. And even more parenthetically, that he did so while insisting that Obama show us his grades, which echoes his recent opinions about the comparative talents of white folks and minorities.
Hajjaj suggests that a goof-off like Trump is mostly an irritant and distraction for more serious nations and politicians.
The metaphor isn’t random. Trump became known in his first administration for failure to read briefing papers and for walking out of the room in the middle of verbal briefings.
It was even reported that his staff resorted to inserting his name into papers simply so he’d read them, which reminded me of Joe Gargery, the illiterate blacksmith in “Great Expectations,” who perused the newspapers for combinations of J and O.
Dave Granlund suggests that the tariffs will backfire here. Calls to “buy American” may sound nice but don’t play out in real life.
The theory of tariffs is that, by increasing the price of imported goods, you encourage consumers to buy domestic products, but there are a couple of flaws in the theory.
One is that it assumes your own companies won’t take the opportunity to raise their own prices when they no longer have to compete with cheap imports. I leave that to those who can probe the souls of Mexican and Canadian corporations, but I’m pretty sure how it works within our borders.
The other, more major issue is that we’re no longer in the 19th century and tariffs didn’t really work that well even back then.
Nearly everything, even if it’s “made in the USA” contains materials and parts from someplace else. That’s just a fact, and it was a fact back when McKinley’s tariff system was enriching robber barons and bankrupting farmers.
Tariffs, like sales taxes, fall most heavily on lower incomes, because the increased costs are a larger percentage of their total income, while they barely impact the wealthy for whom a quart of milk or even a new car comes out of petty cash.
By contrast, income taxes are by definition proportional to earnings and potentially fair, as long as they aren’t skewed in order to spare the wealthy from paying into the system from which they obtain their wealth.
Thus, as Ann Telnaes points out, it’s easy for Dear Leader to say the increased prices that will result from his tariffs are a small price to pay because, for him, they are a small price to pay. He’s likely been to a grocery store less often than you’ve been to Paris, which he demonstrates with his belief that people have to show identification to buy groceries.
Jacob Riis wrote “How the Other Half Lives” because, in those days before broadcasting, the middle class and wealthy never saw the other half of America. Today there’s less excuse for not knowing and it takes a real effort for a man to close his eyes and pretend that he just doesn’t see.
But for the woman in Telnaes’ cartoon, a 15 or 25% rise in grocery prices could put her over the top. It’s one thing to have a stack of bread on the table to fill in for the sparse servings of meat and vegetables, but that jump in price that Trump dismisses as worthwhile can readily put a family in “Feed the kids and let the parents go hungry” mode, if not worse.
Which makes it twice as infuriating that Rep. Rich McCormick (Rep-GA) favors cutting free school lunches and making kids get jobs. Forgive me if I remember when NY Governor Mario Cuomo railed against extended hours for young workers, saying becoming educated was their full-time job.
Forgive me, too, if I know that, in the days of McKinley’s tariffs, two- and three-year-old children worked long hours in their ghetto hovels helping their parents do piecework …
… while out in the countryside, nine-year-old “breakers” sat in rows kicking chunks of coal down the line.
Garth German points out that the GOP railed against unelected government people until they got their hands on the whip, at which point an unelected plutocrat was handed the power to defy the law.
Bizarro offers a prediction, while the workers’ love of sarcastic humor issues first from Utah, with a joke about blind corporate bosses:
And then an echoing ditty from the Pennsylvania coal country:
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