Throw me a frickin' tariff - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Months ago, Scott had a little fun with the whole tariff situation, initiating tariffs from The Chaff against my column, Keith’s column and others - not even our beloved Betty Graber Watson was exempt. In fact, I believe it was for that very reason that she was targeted. She was just too damned positive and someone had to cut her optimism and cheerfulness down to size.

 

Silly and absurd is how that column could likely be described - not unlike much of The Chaff’s installments, by design - but who could have guessed that, instead of The Chaff slowly trending towards our accepted reality, that our accepted reality - the one that’s being forced on us by a handful of Masters of the Universe with billions of dollars and plenty of influence - would trend more into The Chaff territory?

 

We’ve all seen the footage of U.S. President Donald Trump holding the big board of tariffs that he alleges are levied against the United States and then the tariffs that he would, in turn, be charging those countries. Aside from what is alleged to be some form of gorilla math to calculate some of these figures and the fun being poked at slapping remote islands only inhabited by penguins is the contest moving forward between some of the more highly-tariffed countries. It’s silly and absurd, as I alluded to earlier, but it could also be described as an effete kind of measuring contest. What’s being measured, we may never know.

 

And while Saturday Night Live has employed the services of the great Mike Myers as Elon Musk to bring back Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, it is perhaps Trump and his tariffs and his enemies playing the game that could be the most Dr. Evil of the Dr. Evils. 

 

In one of the movies, Dr. Evil requests $1 million at one point, which is correctly identified as an absurdly low amount when asking for a high ransom in the late 1990s, when the movie takes place. He then overcorrects and asks for $100 billion, which, in a scene set in 1969, is seen as a comically astronomical number. Indeed, even the film’s U.S. President, played by Tim Robbins, laughs it off, saying that Evil’s request was akin to asking for “a kajillion, bajillion dollars”. Fast forward a few generations and the aforementioned Musk has well over $300 billion in his bank account.

 

When the U.S. proposed to tariff alcohol coming from the U.K., the U.K. retaliated and Trump threatened a 250 per cent tariff on any booze coming from the U.K. When it comes to negotiations with China, we’re up into the hundreds in regards to percentages and everything just gets multiplied during each escalation. One has to think that we will eventually arrive at the countries’ governments telling the other that they’ll be slapping tariffs of a kajillion per cent on things in response to the other tariffs of a bajillion per cent.

 

It starts to become comical at a certain point. Discussing it with some colleagues over the weekend, I told them that I had, largely, stopped paying attention, as they were sure to follow the tit-for-tat model until they reached numbers that were so large and, frankly, stupid, that it was no longer logical.

 

And yet, the real stupid, illogical and astronomical numbers have yet to be seen. They will be the numbers associated with the cost of certain things, for Americans, if the tariffs and trade wars persist. One analyst said that an iPhone made in America, which is what Trump wants, would cost $3,500 - a far cry from their current cost. It’s almost as if a man who’s gone bankrupt between six and eight times is in charge of a country’s economy.